The Linux Experiment

At home, my setup consists of three machines -  a laptop, a PC, and an XBOX 360. The latter two share a set of speakers, but I hate having to climb under the desk to switch the cables around, and wanted a better way to switch them back and forth. My good friend Tyler B suggested that I run the line out from the XBOX into the line-in on my sound card, and just let my computer handle the audio in the same way that it handles music and movies. In theory, this works great. In practice, I had one hell of a time figuring out how to force the GNOME sound manager applet into doing my bidding.

After quite a bit of googling, I found the answer on the Ubuntu forums. It turns out that the secret lies in a pulse audio module that isn’t enabled by default. Open up a terminal and use the following commands to permanently enable this behaviour. As always, make sure that you understand what’s up before running random commands that you find on the internet as root:

pactl load-module module-loopback
sudo sh -c ' echo "load-module module-loopback" >>  /etc/pulse/default.pa '

The first line instructs PulseAudio (one of the many ways that your system talks with the underlying sound hardware) to load a module called loopback, which unsurprisingly, loops incoming audio back through your outputs. This means that you can hear everything that comes into your line-in port in real time. Note that this behaviour does not extend to your microphone input by design. The second line simply tells PulseAudio to load this module whenever the system starts.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have jerks to run over in GTA…

For various reasons, Rhythmbox (the default GNOME audio player) returns this wonderful message, which I’m putting off troubleshooting for the time being:

rhythmbox: error while loading shared libraries: libplds4.so.7: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

I decided to install Songbird instead. Problem is, I can’t seem to install the Songbird package from the overlay manager, either by unmasking or otherwise. I’m still a bit confused on how to manually install ebuilds as well. Here’s what I ended up doing to get my music collection back up and running:

• Downloaded default Linux package from GetSongbird.
• Extracted package to directory of my choice. Right now it’s sitting in ~/Desktop/Songbird, but I expect to move it to a more appropriate /opt/songbird soon.
• Removed all gstreamer libraries from the main installation as per this comment in the Gentoo bug tracker:

  rm -rf lib/libgst*

• Added Songbird to my GNOME menu in Sound and Video category. I haven’t been able to pick an appropriate icon – any official ones or suggestions?

Yup. Not sure why. It just happened. I have tried messing around in my audio settings and still nothing. In fact the only audio device I can get to play is not PulseAudio, or anything standard like that, but rather the Intel audio card that it found for my system. While this is all fine and promising it still doesn’t work right. When I tried to set it as my primary device and restarted my machine KDE threw a bunch of error messages my way saying that it couldn’t use the Intel device (really? because that was the only one that worked for me…) and instead fell back to PulseAudio (really? because that one doesn’t work for me…).

Why is it that Linux works great for a short while and then suddenly breaks itself?