Various applications using sound always fail in Fedora 8. Appears to be an upstream ALSA bug. https://bugtrack.alsa-project.org/alsa-bug/view.php?id=2601 http://pulseaudio.org/ticket/23 I encountered it when trying to start ustunts (from the ultimatestunts-0.7.3-4.fc8.x86_64 package.)
aha, okay. moved to pulseaudio.
The comments at the two links I originally posted seemed to imply the bug is somewhere in alsa-lib. In any case, that these applications fail to start / crash due to the new alsa / pulseaudio setup in Fedora 8 is very unfortunate.
I have the same problem with xemacs (when I use sound in the xemacs config), xemacs fails then with: xemacs: pcm_params.c:2351: sndrv_pcm_hw_params: Assertion `err >= 0' failed. My workaround for the moment is to remove 'alsa-plugins-pulseaudio', I found this workaround here http://support.gizmoproject.com/index.php?_m=knowledgebase&_a=viewarticle&kbarticleid=330
This also causes ekiga to crash and burn unless you set "Preferences -> Sound Events -> Alternative Output Device" to anything NOT the "Default".
This is most likely fixed by the newest alsa-plugins-pulseaudio. Could you please try?
No such luck - it's still broken with the same error message. Does alsa-plugins-pulseaudio-1.0.15-3.fc8.1 include this patch https://bugtrack.alsa-project.org/alsa-bug/file_download.php?file_id=2513&type=bug as described on https://bugtrack.alsa-project.org/alsa-bug/view.php?id=2601 or would change need to go into an updated alsa-lib?
It looks like this bug has been fixed in Fedora 9. I currently have alsa-lib-1.0.16-3.fc9 and alsa-lib-1.0.16-3.fc9 installed and ustunts now starts fine.