Disabling PulseAudio HowTo

From openSUSE

General instructions

OpenSUSE 11.1 comes with a simple script and a YaST interface to disable PulseAudio for some applications in the system. To run it, follow this procedure:

• Open a terminal and acquire root's rights with the command "su".
• Type: setup-pulseaudio --disable
• Done!

GNOME specific instructions

Unfortunately disabling PulseAudio with the script introduced above does not affect GNOME on openSUSE 11.1, which will keep using PulseAudio anyway.

According to a discussion on the opensuse-factory mailing list, GNOME has hard dependencies on GNOME from upstream, as a consequence, to disable PulseAudio it will be necessary to:

• Identify the packages with hard dependencies on PulseAudio.
• Patch them so they can use other sound systems. An additional difficulty might be represented by the fact that GNOME seems not to accept patches of this kind upstream.

KDE specific instructions

KDE seems less problematic than GNOME when it comes to disable PulseAudio. (Can someone check if the script actually disables it?)

For the future, KDE is not going to rely on PulseAudio by default upstream as you can read in Aaron Seigo blog. So, disabling PulseAudio should not be a hard task, if no step to push it also in KDE is done at the distribution level.