[Vm-dev] Pulse audio Scratch plugin causes seg fault on 64bit Ubuntu installation

[David T. Lewis]

On Thu, Aug 02, 2012 at 05:36:42PM -0400, Amos Blanton wrote:
>  
> To reproduce:
> 
> 1. Execute Scratch using current VM and pulse plugin (on Ubuntu 12.04, 64
> bit system):
> Executing: /usr/lib/squeak/4.4.7-2357/squeakvm -encoding UTF-8
> -vm-display-x11 -xshm -plugins
> /usr/lib/scratch/plugins/:/usr/lib/squeak/4.4.7-2357/ -vm-sound-pulse
> /usr/share/scratch/Scratch.image
> (There is no pulse plugin in /usr/lib/scratch/plugins in my installation
> package, so it must be using the one in /usr/lib/squeak/4.4.7-2357)
> 
> 2. Click "Sounds" tab, click play icon next to meow. That results in:
> 
> Segmentation fault
> 
> 10273532 [] in SoundPlayer class>playLoop
> 10262332 Semaphore>critical:
> 10262240 SoundPlayer class>playLoop
> 10273228 [] in SoundPlayer class>startPlayerProcessBufferSize:rate:stereo:
> 10273320 [] in BlockContext>newProcess
> Aborted (core dumped)
> 
> Note that the same package on 32 bit systems does not produce the error
> (playback and recording both work).
> 
> The issue is also described here:
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/squeak-vm/+bug/1009080
> 
> If someone can take a look and patch this, we'd very much appreciate it!
> This is the last major (known) issue we've got with Scratch running on
> Ubuntu.

I cannot get this to fail on my SuSE box, which plays the Scratch "meow"
sound without problems on a freshly compiled 64-bit VM. But I think that
my problem is that I'm not running a pulse audio server, and I don't know
how to start it.

I installed enough Gnome stuff on my box to be able to do the vm-sound-pulse
build, and I do see some compiler warnings that point to type declaration
issues, details on http://bugs.squeak.org/view.php?id=7701. I cannot look
into this further right now, but I suspect it will turn out to be just some
simple type declaration issues to be sorted out.

Dave