Description of problem: After upgrading a mixed-repo system from FC7 to FC8 I get a number of issues, accross various applications, which I'm filing together partly because I am lazy, and partyly because I feel they are related. Apologies for inconvenience caused by that. I have removed (and added yum 'exclude=' stuff for) any non-fedora-core stuff I thought was relevant already. mplayer works fine through this, but Rhythmbox (which uses gstreamer, and therefore 'should' be fine), does not. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): (Roughly, from rpm -qa | grep [blah]) pulseaudio-module-lirc-0.9.7-0.17.svn20071017.fc8 pulseaudio-0.9.7-0.17.svn20071017.fc8 pulseaudio-libs-glib2-0.9.7-0.17.svn20071017.fc8 audacious-plugins-pulseaudio-1.3.5-3.fc8 gstreamer-plugins-pulse-0.9.5-0.4.svn20070924.fc8 pulseaudio-libs-0.9.7-0.17.svn20071017.fc8 pulseaudio-utils-0.9.7-0.17.svn20071017.fc8 pulseaudio-module-zeroconf-0.9.7-0.17.svn20071017.fc8 pulseaudio-module-gconf-0.9.7-0.17.svn20071017.fc8 pulseaudio-libs-zeroconf-0.9.7-0.17.svn20071017.fc8 pulseaudio-module-x11-0.9.7-0.17.svn20071017.fc8 pulseaudio-esound-compat-0.9.7-0.17.svn20071017.fc8 alsa-plugins-pulseaudio-1.0.14-5.fc8 kde-settings-pulseaudio-3.5-35.fc8 firefox-2.0.0.9-1.fc8 akode-pulseaudio-2.0.1-9.fc8 firefox-devel-2.0.0.9-1.fc8 pulseaudio-core-libs-0.9.7-0.17.svn20071017.fc8 Various components involved, latest updates as at the current time applied. How reproducible: Various. Steps to Reproduce & Actual results: Run firefox. No sound, without the fix. Run Rhthymbox, and get crackly sound sometimes, and it won't go away without restarting the app. At other times its fine though. Starting up 'pulseaudio' on the command line when it's not present has varying results, but more often than not just crashes rhythmbox. Starting 'pulseaudio' at the command line to recftify the 'cannot connect'/'connection refused' errors to the pulseaudio server causes some of the pulseaudio apps to start, and some to crash out (segfault?). Expected results: Things not to have been broken so badly by this update. Additional info: I can't help but think the other ticket on a similar subject which asks for pulseaudio to be a system service and not a session one is right in principle, if not in implementation details. I don't know why anyone would want sound on a text-console directly, so I don't really agree with that being an issue. Removing 'libasound2' installed by the ATRPMS repo fixed the firefox no-sound issue, so I guess that would be a common thing to look for. I have just also noted that "gstreamer-ffmpeg-0.10.2-4.lvn8" was installed and may be causing similar library conflicts, so I've removed it too. It does not seem to have had any effect though. Rhythmbox still crashes at startup/hitting-'play'. I am willing to help with debug information where I can, and have time. My primary goal is to get Rhythmbox stable and running again, as it's the only app I have found that can copy content and play it within the same system, as well as have half decent random play support.
Firefox doesn't play any sounds. The Flash plugin does. To get it work with PA make sure to install "libflashsupport". Please provide me with the output of "pulseaudio -vv" when you experience those "crackling sounds". You might need to stop pulseaudio first, by calling "pulseaudio -k".
Thanks. I certainly did make sure I installed libflashsupport, and everything else indicated by the YumUpgradeFAQ wiki entry. However I got so hacked off with it that I backed up, and nuked my root partition (/home was left untouched, which leaves the vague possibility of some config being broken??), and then installed a vanilla FC8 on it, and problems still persist. The problem seems to be that because "pulseaudio" is not started up as it's supposed to, the cracking happens when it's not there. What I don't understand is that even with it started (just opening a terminal and running 'pulseaudio &' to background it), IIRC the cracking still happens. Either way, I have resorted (based on other internet evidence) to using XFCE4, with pulseaudio set as an autostarted application to hopefully work around this. I will get back to you with the outputs requested above if I find the problem recurring in XFCE4 or if I get a chance to test it again with Gnome. Hardware-wise, it's a Athlon64/Opteron system with "PCI bridge: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] SG86C202" and the sound card is "Multimedia audio controller: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] AC'97 Sound Controller (rev a0)" if that makes any odds. Perhaps more likely to be a concern is that because x86_64 support failed to provide access to essential browser plugins, it's running the i386 version of FC8. Although again, this has never been a problem with the past 3-4 or more releases of FC. I would vaguely consider going to the proper x86_64 version for testing as I have found resources on how to get that working now, if it would help.
Have you enabled the "ESD" checkbox in gnome-sound-properties?
Closing because no response.