[ltp] T60, Gutsy, woes!

[Phil]

Again, making progress. I've 'cured' the Skype pause - I have been using 
a bluetooth headset and my .asoundrc file specified the bluetooth 
device. I removed this and sound plays from Skype fine. I guess Skype 
was trying to contact the bt device, and only playing to the sound card 
when the bt connect timed out.

The only remaining major problem is that Skype input doesn't work - I'm 
not getting anything in from the microphone. I'll play around with sound 
recorder and see if that suffers the same problem.

I'm getting very tempted to do a clean install of gutsy - I'm sure at 
least some of my problems are due to cruft left over from 6 months of 
feisty.

I agree about Skype, but we actually use it for business, with both 
Skype-in and Skype-out capabilities. None of the open VOIP solutions 
I've look at have the same appearance, to the outside world, of a normal 
land-line. We also have some Windoze users (who are currently having a 
laugh at my upgrade woes) so any solution has to be cross-platform.

Thanks everyone for their comments.
Phil

Richard Neill wrote:
>
>
> Phil wrote:
>> And it takes as long to play sound. Press the 'test' button and 
>> nothing happens, then around 1 minute later, I hear the sound!
>
> That sounds like something weird is happening. Is this:
> alsa,  oss, or  gstreamer at fault?
>
> Suggestion: find a short .wav file. Then try to play it with either
>  *   play    (if needed, install sox)   (which uses /dev/dsp directly)
>  *   aplay   (the alsa method)
>
> If they both work, it's gstreamer at fault. If they break, try using 
> strace:      strace play somefile.wav
> and see what is causing the wait.
>
> As for Skype, it's generally just bad. Closed source, proprietary 
> gratuitously-incompatible protocol, faith-based encryption, P2P 
> bandwith usage.
> => Try out Ekiga (SIP) instead.
>
> Richard
>
>
>
> P.S. If you do decide on a reinstall, you can use dpkg and dselect to 
> save/restore your package selection. Equally, if it's just a 
> particular package being odd, either uninstall (with purge) and 
> reinstall, or try dpkg-reconfigure. Lastly, check for a dotfile in 
> your home directory.
> (Eg delete .gconf* and .gnome*   - obviously, you'll lose your 
> settings, so I suggest you  move rather than delete; or create a  new 
> user account, and see if things work with that.)
>
>
>