New Zealand (South Island)
Seth Kenlon is a UNIX geek, free culture advocate, independent multimedia artist, and D&D nerd. He has worked in the film and computing industry, often at the same time. He is one of the maintainers of the Slackware-based multimedia production project Slackermedia.
Authored Comments
Cool story! You should write an article about how you found Linux. Oh wait, you just didi ;-)
About Pulse: the bluetooth stack requires it, so if a distro wants bluetooth then pulse is required, unless someone patches it out and maintains functionality. There's pretty detailed explanation about this on Alien Bob's website http://alien.slackbook.org/blog/pulseaudio-comes-to-slackware-current-b…
The addition of Pulse to Slackware actually doesn't change the sound system at all; Pulse sits on top of ALSA, it does not displace it. You can use Pulse or ALSA, it just depends on what you tell an application to use (or what the application has been hardcoded to use, in some cases).
There's pretty good documentation on this (if I do say so myself...) on Slackermedia:
http://slackermedia.info/handbook/doku.php?id=linuxaudio
and
http://slackermedia.info/handbook/doku.php?id=audiotrouble
The main three points to remember are
0. remove any .asoundrc hacks that might be lying around from previous installs
1. learn how to use Pulse Audio Volume Control (pavucontrol), and use it to route sound
2. don't panic.
EDIT: next month's Multimedia Makers column will be about using Pulse Audio :-) Month thereafter, I'll cover JACK.
Amazing round-up. Swatchbooker is a real find!