[AngryUndead]

In the beginning, I found XBMC and it was good.

I have an AMD 3400+ with 1gb of RAM and a Nvidia 6800GT. Everything worked really well and after a few days I had everything sorted out and displaying the way I wanted. (This is after I found I had to use the svn sources if I wanted any PulseAudio support)

Then I saw an Audigy 1 with a front IR port for sale for 19$. After some quick googling I found that I could use that with LIRC. Wonderful!

It took me an entire day to get the IR port working because nobody on the entire internet mentioned that there was a "livedrive_midi" LIRC driver and I had been trying to use directinput or lirc_serial.

In any case, this led to two issues: one major and one minor.

The minor issue is that XBMC does not respond as well as IRW does to remote commands. This is not that big of a deal.

The major issue is that on occasion using the remote (after a few minutes of navigating around) to control XBMC would cause it to freeze while still playing the same sound over and over again in stutter mode. Using "killall pulseaudio" didn't do anything and doing a "kill -9" or "kill -HUP" with sudo on the XBMC process id would only close XBMC but the sound would still play.

Things started to go downhill when I disabled my onboard sound thinking that it could be causing problems somehow. I got the Audigy sorted out as my sound source (I had been planning to use it as just an IR port) and everything seemed fine but XBMC would still lock up after using the remote for a few minutes.

This is when I decided to disable PulseAudio. After following a few guides on uninstalling it and switching back to pure ALSA I had no sound. I played with that some but nothing would work. I tried to re-enable PulseAudio but now have come to the point where it only plays out of the front headphone jack (there are no other sinks shown) and XBMC crashes when trying to play any video. Totem and VLC work fine, for comparison and play sound (through the front port). After the awesomeness that is XBMC this is simply not satisfactory.

So I have two courses of action:

Code:

1a) Get PulseAudio to work again properly
1b) Build XBMC from the SVN sources
1c) Possibly use the jaunty version of PulseAudio

Code:

2a) Reinstall Ubuntu (8.04.1 LTS or 8.10)
2b) Get everything working again with the remote
2c) Build XBMC from the SVN sources
2d) Reimport my library
2e) Reimport my lircmap/keymap
2f) Possibly use the jaunty version of PulseAudio

The only reason I mention the jaunty version of PulseAudio is because it is supposed to have "so many" fixes. I'd like to get the whole thing sorted out.

In step 2a I'm not sure what version of Ubuntu to try. My experience with Ibex has been more tepid than anything with bugs in way windows are presented and with the new kernels that are offered not working at all. Any thoughts there are appreciated.

The other thing that I would like to do is maybe get some debugging going so I could figure out the problem and help fix it. I have no C/C++ experience other than knowing the grammar/syntax and I have no experience debugging native code on *nix... so I think I'm boned in that respect. (I'm a full-time Java developer with 2/3 of a Master's Degree in Software Engineering but I've stayed away from C/C++ somehow.)

Any help in figuring out a course of action and implementing it would be greatly appreciated.

EDIT: I JUST REALIZED that this is the "LIVE" forum, and I meant to post in the LINUX forum. Could a mod move this? Thanks

[mr_raider]

I solved my pulseaudio issues by compiling from source with the latest SVN. I now pulse set as my default sound output, and use the pulseaudio tools to configure sound output. Give it a try.

[AngryUndead]

So, basically... get pulseaudio from svn and do the whole ./configure then make then make install and then do the same from the XBMC compile guide?

Will this make sure that everything starts properly or am I going to end up doing more digging and configuration. I guess one of the larger problems with what I've got now is that it doesn't see the back audio ports as a sink.

[mr_raider]

So, basically... get pulseaudio from svn and do the whole ./configure then make then make install and then do the same from the XBMC compile guide?

Will this make sure that everything starts properly or am I going to end up doing more digging and configuration. I guess one of the larger problems with what I've got now is that it doesn't see the back audio ports as a sink.

No. I'm using the default pulseaudio from Ubuntu 8.10. You can probably get it by running

Code:

sudo apt-get install asoundconf-gtk

That will pull in all the utilities need to configure pulse audio. Of course, I'm running gnome.

[AngryUndead]

I am running Gnome as well, but that reconfiguring pulse audio thing was what I (guess I) was missing.

I'll give that a shot, reconfiguring pulse / sound and then building from svn. Couldn't get any worse.

[AngryUndead]

Note to mods: I meant to post this in the LINUX support forum... anyway

I'm stuck with this problem:

Code:

The following packages have unmet dependencies:
  libasound2-dev: Depends: libasound2 (= 1.0.17a-0ubuntu4) but 1.0.18-1ubuntu1 is to be installed
E: Broken packages

I guess I just need to get the libasound2 libraries from somewhere? I have no idea what the above error indicates.

EDIT: Turns out I do. I was messing with some jaunty packages earlier and have "poisoned" my install. The way I fixed this was to get the .deb pakages from packages.ubuntu.com and then use "sudo dpkg -i <package" to install them. What I wonder about is how I got past "./configure"

[AngryUndead]

Compiling from scratch fixed my sound problems, apparently.