[Vm-dev] pulse audio default is not suitable for PI package

[K K Subbu]

On 22/04/20 3:37 PM, Levente Uzonyi wrote:
> The problem is that some recent change messed up the depencencies and 
> added the dependencies of all possible binaries (vm and plugins) to 
> everything (vm and plugins).
> So, the VM binary depends on pulseaudio, alsa, uuid, libutil even though 
> it doesn't actually use any of those, but it won't start unless those 
> dependencies are satisfied.
> It's described the thread: 
> http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/vm-dev/2020-April/033404.html

These are two different problems.

Tim reported a potential problem on Raspberry Pi if the default sound 
module in the Unix VM code is switched from oss to pulse. Linux sound 
servers and drivers depend on the distro. Ubuntu uses pulse server while 
Raspbian uses ALSA. Both have wrappers (padsp and aoss/oss kernel 
module) to support apps like Squeak VM that use OSS (but with 
compromises on quality of sound).

My proposal to handle these variants detect these servers at VM launch 
time and use the command line options to pick the right driver instead 
of depending on default modules in VM. This detection does not depend VM 
but on audio servers currently running on the host and is unaffected by 
the linker bug. The detection should work even for 5.3 release which 
currently does not work on Ubuntu.

Regards .. Subbu