Sound failure (continues after SL is no longer working)

Hey all

I'm running Ubuntu 8.10, I'm lucky as I'm not suffering from graphics problems, but I am have a very niggling one. (NVIDEA driver 177 and 180 confirmed to be ok, for the record)

After about five minutes of operation, the sound-server gives up the ghost. It locks and will play a very very short loop of any sound it was just playing, (or silence if there wasnt any sound). This affects SL and local media playback (IE: on the PC, not on SL).

Another bug is that the client refuses to shut down properly, I need to get it to crash before it compeltey 'shuts down' (which I do by telling to stream music, which of course, kills it)


On a related note, I would ask that the 'virtualized hardware' be included in SL's happy-list so a virtual OS could use it.

If I have voice enabled then SL hangs on shut down
works fine if voice is off

Running Latest relase of Ununtu

Ambient sounds and UI play just fine on the newest client, but streaming media doesn't play at all. No crashes, no hangups... and no sound. Haven't tried voice yet. I confirmed that I have every gstreamer codec on the planet installed. Both the vanilla client from secondlife.com and the CoolViewer mod (also 1.22) do the same thing. Confirmed that I still have streaming audio enabled in my preferences, cranked the volume all the way up until ambient bird twittering nearly blew my speakers off the desk.

System is a 32-bit ArchLinux on AMD single-core with 1.5GB RAM, NVidia GEForce MX4000, Ensoniq PCI 1371 sound card. This setup was working with 1.21.

Any suggestions on how to troubleshoot this?

Segfault

Also, interacting with inworld and onscreen objects (like HUD items) is impossible for the first 10 minutes or so as the cursor dosent change.

There are known issues with OpenAL and ALSA version 1.0.17, when used with Pulseaudio 0.9.10. The basic gist of it is that OpenAL causes severe buffer underrun problems, which causes Pulseaudio 0.9.10 to eventually roll over and die.

I've been running ALSA 1.0.18 with Pulseaudio 0.9.14 for the last month or so, and am happy to say that the days of Pulseaudio crashing and dying are over.

Unfortunately, it's not because OpenAL has decided to play nice. It hasn't. But Pulseaudio can handle the buffer underruns a bit more gracefully. Instead of dying, I get severely crackly audio. Adjusting Pulseaudio's scheduling (TSCHED=0) fixes that problem, but floods my system logs with messages along the lines of ALSA being woken up without anything to read or write.

The point is, OpenAL continues to have major issues, but the problems with Pulseaudio rolling over and dying will be gone with the release of Ubuntu Jaunty Jackelope (9.04). Hopefully the updated Pulseaudio and ALSA drivers will be backported to Hardy and Intrepid.