Re: [Ekiga-list] Issues

[Derek Smithies <derek indranet co nz>]

Hi,
 One of the answers on this topic said that you had to use pasuspender,
 and make some changes to alsa configuration files. the changes required
 are non trivial.
   Some people claim the changes are easy - just paste in these couple of
    lines they say. Those people were lucky. Other people have invested
    tens of hours trying to decode & understand the meaning of the
    components in the alsa configuration files.
   After too many hours of bitter experience, I suggest that you
 **Forget pasuspender
 **Refuse to make any changes to your configuration files.

The most recent version of ubuntu (9.10) has made a "reasonable" job of 
pulseaudio. I suspect that the other major distros (fedorra, suse) have 
also got pulse right.

The main problem in pulse is the
 *number of misbehaving alsa based applications out there,
     which do things wrong.
 *alsa audio drivers not being 100% compliant with alsa spec.

I suggest that you upgrade to the latest distro and get the most recent 
versions of the different drivers.

I suggest you shut down every application that makes audio on your 
desktop. One of them may be killing the sound device.

If you do a wireshark dump of the entire call, remember to set the packet 
size to 2000, and look for the udp packets (which carry the voice).
There will be two streams of udp packets. One stream from you to him.
One stream from him to you.
you said voice stops after 15 (or so) seconds. Do the udp packets stop 
being sent from your end? if they do, you know that the problem is at your 
end.

Silence detection may have gone wrong. Turn off silence detection. Does 
this help?

Eliminate the possibility of it being a firewall issue.
Get a second computer on your lan.
Can you do a ekiga call to that computer, and does the voice last longer 
than 15 seconds? Get the other person to do the same.


Derek.
=======================================

 On Tue, 5 Jan 2010, David Bowman wrote:

> Okay, so first I'd like to say thank you for everything.  I'm a little further out of the water but I was wondering what this means:
>
> [jetblackbivouac localhost ~]$ pasuspender ekiga
> ALSA lib conf.c:976:(parse_value) default is not a string
> ALSA lib conf.c:1589:(snd_config_load1) _toplevel_:12:9:Unexpected char
> ALSA lib conf.c:2850:(snd_config_hook_load) /etc/alsa/alsactl.conf may be old or corrupted: consider to remove or fix it
> ALSA lib conf.c:2714:(snd_config_hooks_call) function snd_config_hook_load returned error: Invalid argument
> ALSA lib control.c:909:(snd_ctl_open_noupdate) Invalid CTL hw:0
> ALSA lib control.c:909:(snd_ctl_open_noupdate) Invalid CTL hw:1
> ALSA lib control.c:909:(snd_ctl_open_noupdate) Invalid CTL hw:0
> ALSA lib control.c:909:(snd_ctl_open_noupdate) Invalid CTL hw:1
>
> Both me and my partner could not be more grateful for all your help. 
> Thanks for your time,
> David

--
Derek Smithies Ph.D.
IndraNet Technologies Ltd.
ph +64 3 365 6485
Web: http://www.indranet-technologies.com/

"The only thing IE should be used for is to download Fire Fox"

"My favorite language is call STAR. It's extremely concise. It has
 exactly one verb '*', which does exactly what I want at the moment."
    --Larry Wall