No pulseaudio without installing mate on centos.

ravenclaw · 2016-02-14 09:07:57

Greetings everyone,

I'm having an xfce specific sound issue related to xfce and centos.
Hoping someone smarter than me can help .

I've been trying to install centos 7 minimal and then just installing xfce. It works great but the only problem is sound doesn't seem to work in xfce without installing mate separately. If I just install xfce, I can go into the audio mixer app is and it lists my device (HD Audio Generic - Alsa Mixer).
But if I add a volume control to the panel and select that device it is off and says "No Valid Device and/or Element".

So then if I install mate.. it installs 500 packages and then suddenly a new entry appears in the xfce mixer/volume control "Playback: Built In Audio Digital Sterio - PulseAudio Mixer".
If I select that for the volume control then walla it works and I have sound.

So the question is how can I get that without installing all of mate? I tried just yum install alsa-plugins-pulseaudio, which installed like 12 pulseaudio packages.. but it still didn't work until I installed the rest of mate.

Obviously I could just install mate and not use it but I was hoping to have a cleaner system and installing mate also seems to slow xfce down a bit.

I asked this on the centos forum and they suggested you guys might know better since it is xfce specific.

As a side note i've tried xubuntu and also needed to install pulseaudio to get sound working.. so it seems like pulseaudio is just needed by my sound card.. but i'm not sure how to get it working with centos 7 without mate.

Thanks

Last edited by ravenclaw (2016-02-14 09:10:47)

ToZ · 2016-02-14 16:15:58

I don't usually enable sound on my centos servers, but I just had a look and you're right - it doesn't seem to work out of the box. I got it to work, somehow, but I'm not exactly sure what I did.

I think it might be:

xfconf-query -c xfce4-mixer -p /active-card --create -t string -s "HDAIntelPCHAlsamixer"
xfconf-query -c xfce4-mixer -p /sound-card --create -t string -s "HDAIntelPCHAlsamixer"

...then installing the gstreamer-plugins-good package.

ravenclaw · 2016-02-15 20:17:44

Thanks ToZ,
I might try that method but I suspect my sound card needs pulseaudio since on a ubuntu distro I couldn't get sound working without installing the pulseaudio packages.(aka apt-get install pulseaudio pavucontrol) and likewise on opensuse (I could activate the card with just also but it would not work until I used pulseaduio).

But with Centos I can't figure out how to get pulseaudio working without installing mate, and just with xfce.
Anyone know?

Thanks!

ToZ · 2016-02-15 20:59:01

ravenclaw wrote:

But with Centos I can't figure out how to get pulseaudio working without installing mate, and just with xfce.

pulseaudio is installed just not activated. Install the pulseaudio-module-x11 package and it will autostart on the next login. You might also need alsa-plugins-pulseaudio.

I've tried three times now to get that mixer plugin to work and although it starts up for me eventually, I do not know the secret combination. If I had to guess, about an hours worth of frustration and putzing around is what it takes.

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#1 2016-02-14 09:07:57

No pulseaudio without installing mate on centos.

#2 2016-02-14 16:15:58

Re: No pulseaudio without installing mate on centos.

#3 2016-02-15 20:17:44

Re: No pulseaudio without installing mate on centos.

#4 2016-02-15 20:59:01

Re: No pulseaudio without installing mate on centos.

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