Sound Issues with Kubuntu Karmic Koala
Since upgrading my work machine to karmic koala, I’ve noticed that my sound had stopped working. There were some broken packages in aptitude and Skype knew there was a problem as it notified me when I tried to make a call. I saw some issues reported with karmic, notably this one, so I uninstalled pulseaudio
sudo aptitude remove pulseaudio
When I restarted Skype, everything seemed to work as expected – for reference I have a thinkpad T400, if you’re having the same issues, then hopefully this will help!
oh, dear not another “remove pulseaudio” post! On my netbook (dell mini13n) doing this disabled my wireless and my sound, and the little fella has never been the same.
mwic: oh that’s not good! I didn’t have any side effects when I did it but I did see a few horror stories and google for my laptop model specifically. Sorry to hear you had issues
For me, pulseaudio has caused no end of problems (on various machines). I’m always dubious about pieces of software that must be “removed” rather than reconfigured (or even disabled for that matter).
Maybe they should rethink this for Lucid Lynx?
Rick: There’s more to this story than a borken package. Pulseaudio is, from what I understand it, an excellent package but rather misunderstood. I can’t represent it correctly so I won’t try, but do read up about the background of it since its not the fault of pulseaudio and the actual story is interesting.