On Sun, Dec 30, 2012 at 01:39:45PM +0000, Chris Green wrote:

I am slowly getting to understand what's going on with sound on my little Acer Revo. However I still *don't* understand why sometimes PulseAudio can see some output devices and sometimes it can't.

When it has no output devices not surprisingly I can't get any sound out of it, I then curse it for a while, run various things to see if I can understand what's going on, and at some point it works - but I can never understand why!

So, how does one get output devices to appear? Then, further, how does one do this from the command line, because I want to run this headless and will only have ssh access. (Running X remotely doesn't work with modern applications as they use DBUS which breaks X)

Well the best cure seems to be to uninstall pulseaudio, it really doesn't like working properly on a headless server. For example pavucontrol just falls in a crumpled heap if you try and run it from another machine (i.e. pavucontrol on client using remote machine as X display server), it looks for a local dBus an, not surprisngly, can't find it. Removing pulseaudio and using the command line alsa utilities allowed me to get mpd working very nicely and now I have my Acer Revo running as a sound server driving my HiFi. -- Chris Green