I disabled using of pulseaudio in my system. Everything goes good, but some programs says:

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ALSA lib pcm_dmix.c:1008:(snd_pcm_dmix_open) unable to open slave


and plays no sound until the process pulseaudio is killed

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pavel@pavel:/var/tmp> ps aux | grep pulse
pavel    13290  1.0  0.2 290476  9088 ?        Ssl  Jul30  17:26 /usr/bin/pulseaudio --start --log-target=syslog
pavel    30443  0.0  0.0   7360   876 pts/1    S+   11:22   0:00 grep pulse


As you can see, it is the userspace process. When I do not start KDE, the pulseaudio is not started.

How can I disable startup of pulseaudio while KDE startup?

Please search for any Xine or GStreamer plugins for Pulseaudio and remove them.

bcooksley wrote:Please search for any Xine or GStreamer plugins for Pulseaudio and remove them.

Thanks. This helped. But I thought, that there is another way (less firm) - just to disable startup of pulseaudio instead its complete removal.

Unfortunately, I do not know of any other method, since they failed to test the case a user wanted to disable Pulseaudio while using Xine. The above action was recommended to me when I posted at the openSUSE forums.

You can write a script, killall -TERM pulseaudio, and execute it on KDE startup but, if you plain not use pulseaudio de best solution is remove pulseaudio packages.

Some investigations:

libpulse0 reverse depends:

kdebase-runtime
libxine1-misc-plugins
mplayer

libpulse0 contents:

/usr/lib/libpulse.so.0.8.0
/usr/lib/libpulse-simple.so.0.0.2
/usr/lib/libpulsecommon-0.9.15.so

/etc/pulse/client.conf
/usr/lib/libpulse.so.0
/usr/lib/libpulse-simple.so.0

Well, in openSUSE libpulse is the library only but you need pulseaudio daemon. Without this daemon there is no pulseaudio sound.

You must uninstall pulseaudio daemon, in openSUSE is in other package named pulseaudio, but several packages have dependencies with libpulse so can't be uninstalled.

kcmshell4 kcm_phonon will show PulseAudio device, even without pulseaudio package installed.

Not so obvious to identify where this PulseAudio device comes from.

The Pulseaudio device likely comes from the presence of the Pulseaudio library, hence likely why it is a dependency of kdebase-runtime.

I'm sorry to revive this old topic, but I had a similar problem, and found a solution, which I'd like to share for anyone how could be in my situation.

Problem: GNOME and KDE4 installed on an openSUSE. PulseAudio is a must for GNOME, but I personally prefer to use ALSA when I'm in KDE4.

Solution:
1. Disable PulseAudio; in openSUSE that's easy:

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# setup-pulseaudio --disable

For other distros, I suppose one should set autospawn = no in /etc/pulse/client.conf

2. Create a pulseaudio.desktop file in /etc/xdg/autostart (I believe all distros have an XDG directory, but I'm not sure) with the following content:

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[Desktop Entry]
X-SuSE-translate=true
Name=PulseAudio
Comment=PulseAudio sound system
Icon=volume-knob
Exec=pulseaudio
Terminal=false
Type=Application
OnlyShowIn=GNOME;LXDE;
X-GNOME-Autostart-enabled=true

As you may suggest, when you start KDE, there is not process pulseaudio + gconf-something.

Between, if you have both KDE and GNOME on the same system, there are some GNOME processes which are started in KDE (e. g. blueman in openSUSE). If you want to keep your KDE session clean from GNOME process, you should check the .desktop files in /etc/xdg/autostart and add OnlyShowIn=GNOME or NotShowIn=KDE where appropriate.

That's it. I hope this would be helpful and have fun!

Dimitar