[Vm-dev] [OpenSmalltalk/opensmalltalk-vm] No sound on Linux (#489)

[K K Subbu]

On 24/04/20 12:02 AM, contrapunctus-1 wrote:
> On a related note...does the VM try to detect which sound backend it 
> should be using? It seems to use OSS by default, which doesn't seem to 
> be a good choice for modern Linux systems 🤔

It is difficult for the (Linux) VM to guess the sound module to be used 
on startup because preferred audio servers differ across distros and is 
user-configurable. OSS is a common denominator emulated even by modern 
audio servers but is getting long in the tooth, indeed. Pulse server is 
widely used today but there is also the ALSA server on Linux distros 
like Raspbian. Squeak VM also has to accommodate systems like RPi or 
OLPC apart from Linux, FreeBSD or Solaris (x86) laptops.

There are currently two changes being discussed.

* I have proposed a patch [1] to launch script, squeak.sh, that will 
detect the currently active server being used and launch the VM with the 
right sound module. The VM code itself will not change. This is 
expedient and easy to test and deploy on released VMs.
* Tobias and Dave Stes have proposed changing the probing order of sound 
modules to pulse->alsa->oss->nas->sun so that modern servers are 
preferred over legacy emulation. This is a good fix for upcoming releases.

[1] https://github.com/squeak-smalltalk/squeak-app/pull/17

Regards .. Subbu