On Sunday 12 October 2008 06:01, William W. Austin wrote: [snip] I don't have F9 on this machine to check, but it seems there were reports of Audigy working with pulseaudio on this list. You may want to check the archives. The main problem, though, is that you want to use both Audigy and Realtek cards simultaneously, which is problematic to setup (to say the least). There were questions on the list about that as well. The way I see it, pulseaudio works between userspace apps and ALSA. Its major (or only?) purpose is to make volume controls of various apps independent of each other. A typical use-case: you listen to some music in xmms, and then skype starts ringing. You want to answer the call and talk, while turning the volume of xmms down just a little so it doesn't interfere with your friends voice too much. Without pulseaudio this is downright impossible, because the only volume control available is the system-wide mixer --- which turns volume down for both xmms and skype simultaneously. Pulseaudio is designed to deal with this problem. Another use-case: you are watching a movie in mplayer, and have to turn the system volume way up high because the movie sound is badly recorded. And in the middle of playback, some background app suddenly crashes, and the KDE sound notification blows away your speakers and your ears. If you had pulseaudio, you could adjust the volume of mplayer and KDE notifications independently. I believe you have avoided such problems by using two sound cards, but this functionality should better be available in software rather then a hardware requirement. So you may choose to remove pulseaudio altogether and use only alsa and your old setup, or you may choose to try and configure pulseaudio to use both sound cards (though I don't know how to do it). This has also been discussed to death on the list. In short, KDE4 is not an upgrade of KDE3, but a complete rewrite from scratch. Given that, it still does lack some configuration options that were present in KDE3 --- the developers just need some more time to implement them again in the new code framework. But it is being done very fast, and KDE 4.2 (iirc, to come with F10) will be much more feature-rich then the present version 4.1. The complete rewrite of the code is due to the changed paradigm of what a desktop environment should be and how it should function --- note that icons are removed from the desktop and widgets are put on, etc. If you dislike the new paradigm you may stick with the dying KDE3.5, or configure KDE4 to resemble it as much as you can/need. Not sure what you are describing. You can certainly add "Application Launcher" widget to the desktop, move it whereever you like and click on it to open the menus. What else do you have in mind? Update F9 to current KDE 4.1. Make sure widgets are unlocked. Open the menu in kickoff style, browse to your app, right click and select "add to panel". The latter. Not all configurability is ready yet. One thing I miss a lot is panel hiding. I hear it is to be implemented in version 4.2, so I just have to wait for it. :-( As I understand it is quite hard to go back. Basically, your best bet would be to remove everything related to KDE4, and then recompile whole KDE3 from source. But I've also read that KDE3 is dying (no longer being developed nor actively maintained) so maybe this is not such a good option for long-term. HTH, :-) Marko

On Monday 13 October 2008 00:06, Kevin Kofler wrote: Ok, but I guess that it would eventually become available and get pulled in with the updates? Or will it appear not before F11? That's good news! Hope it will work out ok! :-) Best, :-) Marko

Marko Vojinovic <vvmarko <at> panet.co.yu> writes: F10 will ship with 4.1.2 or 4.1.3, not 4.2. There's simply no way we can ship 4.2 in F10 when it's not even in alpha yet, its alpha release is scheduled for the day of the final development freeze and the beta release for the day of the F10 release. We just cannot ship F10 with an alpha KDE (even a beta 1 would be bad, and there's no way we can rush that in anyway, even getting the tarballs early as packagers, because Fedora releases are cut some time before the official release date). We're testing a backport of panel autohiding though. See the kdebase-workspace-4.1.2-5.fc10 package for F10 and the kdebase-workspace-4.1.2-5.fc9 package for F9 (note that you need the 4.1.2 stuff from updates-testing to test that build). I can't promise yet that the feature will stay (we're still gathering feedback - if it's too broken, we'll have to revert it and wait for 4.2), but if it works out fine, it'll likely end up both released with F10 and pushed to the F9 updates. Kevin Kofler

On Sunday 12 October 2008 08:01, William W. Austin wrote: I can't help with configuring Pulseaudio, as on both F8, and F9 I disabled it, because sound no longer worked with my Audigy2 soundblaster card. With 2 soundcards I can imagine the problem being even worse. To disable Pulseaudio, you only need to remove the package alsa-plugins-pulseaudio, which will also remove the kde-settings-pulseaudio package. By doing this your sound apps will revert to using Alsa directly, as on earlier versions of Fedora. Hopefully that will be enough, so that you can get your 2 cards up and running again. If you have audio apps that use SDL, you can also add this line to ~/.bashrc, which will remove the hack that SDL programs need, to use Pulseaudio. See below. unset SDL_AUDIODRIVER All the best. Nigel.