Kubuntu rides again

After installing Fedora 12 and having another round of sound problems after I thought I had it all working with Fedora 10 and 11 I thought I would try Kubuntu because previously everything just works with Kubuntu.

Well, much to my surprise, Kubuntu also has sound problems. So there was nothing else to do but start digging. After a bit of experimentation I was able to work out that I needed to make PulseAudio the default and tell Pulse to set-up an ALSA compatibility module.

To make Pulse the default create ~/.asoundrc with the following content.

pcm.!default { type pulse }

ctl.!default { type pulse }

Then set-up the correct modules for the pulseaudio daemon in the file /etc/pulse/default.pa

### Load audio drivers statically (it's probably better to not load

### these drivers manually, but instead use module-hal-detect --

### see below -- for doing this automatically)

load-module module-alsa-sink device=hw:0

load-module module-alsa-source device=hw:0

load-module module-alsa-card device_id=0

#load-module module-oss device="/dev/dsp" sink_name=output source_name=input

#load-module module-oss-mmap device="/dev/dsp" sink_name=output source_name=input

#load-module module-null-sink

load-module module-pipe-sink