Bug 435148

Created attachment 296088 [details]
pidgin debug log

Is alsa-plugins-pulseaudio installed?  Does it work if you remove it?

Please install pidgin-debuginfo and get a backtrace as described on
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/StackTraces

(In reply to comment #2)
> Is alsa-plugins-pulseaudio installed?  Does it work if you remove it?
> 

Yes, alsa-plugins-pulseaudio was installed.  The problem does seem to go away
when I remove it.

I've reinstalled it now however and will get you a backtrace shortly.

Created attachment 296111 [details]
Backtrace from pidgin crash.

This appears to be crashing in pulseaudio, re-assigning.

Does the problem persist when you select pulseaudio sink in gnome-sound-properties?

Do other sounds play fine via pulseaudio?
Try paplay /usr/share/gnome-power-manager/gpm-critical-power.wav

I'm having the same problems mentioned above. I've gone over this with Stu and
the only way I've been able to use Pidgin is by disabling sound notifications in
the app. 

When i try to run gnome-sound-properties I get an alert window that says "Unable
to start the settings manager 'gnome-settings-daemon'.
Without the GNOME settings manager running, some preferences may not take
effect. This could indicate a problem with Bonobo, or a non-GNOME (e.g. KDE)
settings manager may already be active and conflicting with the GNOME settings
manager." 

And when I try to play the sound file above I get " paplay
/usr/share/gnome-power-manager/gpm-critical-power.wav
Connection failure: Connection refused"

*** Bug 436450 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

(In reply to comment #7)
> Does the problem persist when you select pulseaudio sink in
gnome-sound-properties?
> 
> Do other sounds play fine via pulseaudio?
> Try paplay /usr/share/gnome-power-manager/gpm-critical-power.wav

Actually, PulseAudio is currently not working on my system.  I did the Fedora 7
to Fedora 8 upgrade which resulted in sound going away and I haven't fixed it yet.

My thinking was that pidgin should at least handle this situation a bit more
gracefully.

It isn't pidgin that is causing the crash, there's nothing pidgin can do about a
library asserting on a NULL variable.

However, on further investigation it seems my initial diagnosis was wrong and
this might actually be a problem with the alsa-plugins pulse plugin (or maybe a
gstreamer problem, but that's further up the stack), as pcm_pulse.c is part of
alsa-plugins. Re-assigning again.

Should be fixed in alsa-plugins-1.0.16-1.fc9. Closing, as other related
alsa-plugins-pulseaudio problems are tracked by other bugs.

Thanks.  Will this be fixed for Fedora 8 as well?

Ray: is this needed? I'm not for that update, as it has a known workaround and
requires a malfunctioning configuration to be triggered.

However, there are some more issues with the alsa pulse plugin, and I would push
this patch with bugfix update for them in case I find time to fix them.

In case you need the fix for some reason, just pick the pack. It generally just
avoids the problematic assertion as it is bogus.

I would find the update very useful indeed, as once pidgin gets into this state
it is impossible to start it correctly when operating remotely.

I am wondering why bodhi did not add a comment here; well; doing it for him:
alsa-plugins-1.0.15-3.fc8.1 was submitted as an stable update for Fedora 8.