Killing PulseAudio softly...

I've had rather a lot of complaints about Ubuntu 10.04 "Lucid Lynx", including lots about Gwibber and one or two about Empathy, and about non-working sound on my old low-power-hardware desktop, and my old Acer laptop, which isn't all that outdated.

The desktop sound problem isn't actually Ubuntu's fault alone - it appears to be PulseAudio. I installed Fedora 13 "Goddard" to replace Lucid, on the desktop, just to see if Fedora, at least, could work with the sound card and with Skype, or Empathy for Google Talk.

While the whole struggle is a pretty long tale of woe, the short answer is (after two days of installing, uninstalling, poking around, Googling, and trial and error), I finally decided to kick PulseAudio out of the Fedora picture rather brutally - by renaming its binary to a different name.

This, of course, broke many UI controls and stuff to do with audio - but it made Skype work (though the audio does cut off after about half an hour). Still, that's kind of an OK duration at which to have to reboot the comp to get sound again. My Mum uses the comp to Skype my sis, who's in Canada, and half an hour of chatting is way more than I can take, but they happily chat for a couple of hours, sometimes.

I wish my sis would find some time to try and set up a Google Talk account in Empathy under the Ubuntu Lucid install her hubby has done on their desktop... but I understand that caring for two young kids can take up your whole day and leave you exhausted. Perhaps that'll happen some day, and we can find out if the dropped audio is indeed a local problem, which I suspect it is, or if Skype is cutting short non-paying calls (IIRC I'd seen similar suspicions on the Net a long time ago, but haven't searched for that recently). I can even try re-enabling PulseAudio and see if Empathy plays nice with it (Google searches yielded discussion threads that said that Skype does not play nicely with PA).

I've been trying to find usable* distributions that don't use PulseAudio - plain ALSA - and haven't come up with any yet. Looks like everyone's piling on the PA bandwagon, and integrating it tightly into the distro, making it hard to eliminate without substantial breakage. If you know of any distros that *don't* use PulseAudio, please help me out and let me know which! I'd like to try them out and see if they work better than my self-broken Fedora.