Posts by greenjeans

greenjeans · DIY

Hah, I love it...yep...Vuu-do Linux, handcrafted using stepwise refinement and multi-solutional iterations (hit-or-miss).

Thanks for the help, I really appreciate it and at some point i'll take you up on the offer to test the next version.

724 lines in asound.conf? Holy crap, that's epic! Yeah I can see where my little script probably wouldn't be good for that system, but it's a dang fine one for testing the limits of it for sure.

greenjeans · Hardware & System Configuration

RE: the alsa errors, have a look here: https://dev1galaxy.org/viewtopic.php?pid=59886#p59886

greenjeans · Other Issues

Thank you @fsmithred!!

I'm so sorry y'all are having to deal with stuff like this right now. Seems like there's quite a few of these upstream shenanigans going on with this release of debian.

greenjeans · Freedom Hacks

Good info and very true, it just takes some work figuring out all the particulars, alsa has a language all it's own.

In general my priorities for sound are based on delivering the simplest most basic config to ship with my distro project, leaving it up to the user to customize as they see fit, rather than saddling them with additional mixers and sound servers that they may dislike.

I also never saw a lot of sense in playing simultaneous streams until a gamer friend pointed out that he liked to listen to music while he played, that I can understand, so i'm testing a new .asoundrc that allows the functions Igor spelled out above, it's still very short and simple and needs some more testing (specifically with the mic) as so far i've just tested simultaneous streaming and it's working great on both single and dual card systems that i've tested.

This config assumes a user also has the EQ plugin package, but no additional plugins like fftrate, just posting it here for general info purposes, @Igor feel free to critique as I wouldn't mind hearing thoughts/suggestions but please don't call me demented, lol.

# Default: route through dmix > plug > equalizer > hardware
pcm.!default {
    type plug
    slave.pcm "dmixed_equal"
}

ctl.!default {
    type hw
    card 0
}

# Equalizer control (for mxeq GUI)
ctl.equal {
    type equal
}

# Final EQ stage: applies to mixed output
pcm.dmixed_equal {
    type equal
    slave.pcm "dmixed_plug"
}

# Plug wrapper for format/rate conversion after dmix
pcm.dmixed_plug {
    type plug
    slave.pcm "dmixed"
}

# dmix: allows multiple playback streams > direct to hardware
pcm.dmixed {
    type dmix
    ipc_key 1024
    ipc_key_add_uid false   # safer than 0
    slave {
        pcm "hw:0,0"
        period_time 0
        period_size 1024
        buffer_size 4096
        rate 44100          # optional: lock rate if needed
    }
    bindings {
        0 0
        1 1
    }
}

# Optional: dsnoop for multiple capture (mic) apps
pcm.dsnooped {
    type dsnoop
    ipc_key 1025
    slave.pcm "hw:0,0"
}

# Optional: full duplex (for simultaneous play+capture)
pcm.duplex {
    type asym
    playback.pcm "dmixed_plug"
    capture.pcm "dsnooped"
}

# Legacy: old names for compatibility/scripts
pcm.plugequal {
    type equal
    slave.pcm "plughw:0,0"
}
pcm.equal {
    type plug
    slave.pcm "plugequal"
}

greenjeans · Documentation

Ahh I see, so yeah it's pretty close to the old school way of measuring ram, what's actually being used, nice.

If you run conky it's easy to check without ever opening anything at boot-up, you can use the "mem" command to get ram usage, and that's the newer way with all buffers and cache and such added in. But you can get the old behavior still at least in Daedalus by using "legacymem" in place of the mem command.

I use the new method generally to get a fuller picture of usage, but I tried legacymem last night for giggles on Vuu-do, and the mini runs 230-240 mb at idle, and the max runs about 260-270.

Openbox FTW.

greenjeans · Documentation

I'm not familiar with that script, is it just calculating mem use minus buffers & cache?

greenjeans · Off-topic

Lol, more hilarity as the world flails about, the reason Cloudflare went down wasn't a DDOS or other attack, it was shit coding in the cloudflare challenge that everybody hates to start with that took down 20% of the internet.

Cloudflare said in a post-mortem statement on Tuesday that a “feature file” used by its Bot Management System to fight off cyberattacks grew beyond its normal limit, leading to a failure in Cloudflare’s software.

greenjeans · Off-topic

https://www.windowscentral.com/microsof … ia-malware

Microsoft has issued an urgent warning to Windows 11 users: The new agentic OS features that allow AI agents to operate also open the door to malware

The real question is, did anybody at all ever expect it to NOT be yet more windoze spyware/malware?

greenjeans · DIY

Ahh I gotcha, and that's the kind of thing I need to know to proceed, problem is I don't have a machine around here to test, I get one line on my single-card lappy, two on the library machine...without having a complex machine with multiple outputs around to test on it's gonna make it really hard for me to extend this script. I kinda need to see what things are doing, my methods involve a lot of trial-and-error.

Basic philosophy/use-case is for Vuu-do as it already has a working alsa system, and is meant for simple everyday garden-variety use, just a quick switch for those machines that have an analog and an HDMI output as most of the time the dual-setups default to HDMI as card 0.

At least at this stage...baby steps...but i'd like to pursue it and figure out all the edge-cases and sub-devices and such so I can package it with AT for general use at some point.

greenjeans · Devuan Derivatives

Dunno, that's a weird one, something's trying to use that systemd command, don't know why. Maybe something in Excalibur is different from Daedalus, I haven't dug into it enough to know. Something in Calamares maybe?

Just FYI on Devuan there is no /etc/machine-id, Devuan changes the machine-id on every boot. Don't know if that has any bearing on your issue.

greenjeans · DIY

Ummm, GPU? Ya lost me there somewhere...

greenjeans · DIY

^^Much appreciated!

No .asoundrc is a case, at the start of this endeavour I am writing this to be included in AlsaTune/Vuu-do which will already have an .asoundrc in the system, but like other things I want to also make a generic/portable version that can be used anywhere so that's the next target for functionality.

Window-size: How many cards are in your list? I had envisioned entries for just a couple, can you elaborate? Do I need a scroll function?

greenjeans · Documentation

it really warms my heart to see the joke fly over everyone's head thanks to my posts being ignored unless i join the whining...

Sorry, I have a tad bit of the 'tism so sometimes I don't recognize sarcasm.

But I don't think everyone is whining, lots of folks contributing new info about sound and potential solutions.

But I should stay out of Pipe-how-to threads in general as I am a founding member of TDAM (The Devuan Alsa Mafia).

greenjeans · DIY

So this is another tiny utility to be added to the toolbox for AlsaTune or other interface, for use in a pure alsa system. This is just the rough prototype, I need to do more testing, and more thinking about possible errors and edge-cases and dealing with them.

It would be great if someone with multiple cards could test, I only have one machine that has two cards and I have tested on it and all the single-card machines and this works fine so far. Curious about systems with more cards and those with sub-devices, and also other possible areas to edit that aren't in my config (you can see in the script it changes for hw, plughw, and card).

This works by merely editing ~/.asoundrc, it uses aplay to get the card list, then seds your choice into the config file. It doesn't require re-booting or even re-loading alsa, you just need to close and re-open any running sound instances like your music player after editing is complete. It also creates a backup of your old config, but for testing purposes you should definitely backup whatever you have now for an .asoundrc.

#!/bin/bash
# soundswitch - simple card switcher for AlsaTune that mods ~/.asoundrc
# TO-DO: deal with subdevices? Any other prefixes common in larger asound files 
# (like card, hw, or plughw below) that need added?

CARDS=$(aplay -l | grep "^card [0-9]")

CHOICE=$(echo "$CARDS" | yad --list --title="Select Sound Card" \
  --column="Card" --width=550 --height=200 --window-icon=info --button="Apply:0" --button="Cancel:1")

[ $? -ne 0 ] && exit 1

CARD_NUM=$(echo "$CHOICE" | cut -d'|' -f1 | grep -o -E '[0-9]' | head -n 1)

if [ -z "$CARD_NUM" ]; then
  yad --title="Error" --width=300 --center --text-align=center --window-icon=error \
--text="\nNo card was selected. Exiting..." --no-buttons --timeout=4
  exit 1
fi

# Backup
cp ~/.asoundrc ~/.asoundrc.bak

# Replace all card #'s with new card #'s
sed -i "s/hw:[0-9],/hw:$CARD_NUM,/g; s/plughw:[0-9],/plughw:$CARD_NUM,/g; s/card [0-9]/card $CARD_NUM/g" ~/.asoundrc

yad --window-icon=info --text-align=center --width=300 --center --title="Sound" \
--text="\nSound card switched to Card $CARD_NUM\n\nConfig backed up to ~/.asoundrc.bak" --button=gtk-ok:0

greenjeans · Documentation

just cancel pipewire and use alsa only + jack every so often, this is literally bloating the desktop with the bloatware of pipewire as if the poettering bloatware of pulseaudio wasn't bad enough,

I'm afraid I agree. But there's a lot of work to be done to make pure alsa more accessible to an average non-technical user. Working on that myself, and forum member @rations just posted some nice work on alsa+jack systems. Even Igor's doing some good, lol, so hopefully there's some resurgence in interest for a nice low latency system without a lot of software on top of it, just needs some simple gui methods to control configs really.

greenjeans · Desktop and Multimedia

Brilliant, I love this stuff. Been working today on a simple script to switch cards, just a little convenience thing to add to AT and make the alsa system a little more user-friendly. Needs more testing and likely more work, but I have a working proto.

greenjeans · Devuan Derivatives

I never removed anything but gnome-keyring in mine, the pkcs11 package had to stay because Exaile wouldn't play internet radio without it (more gnome crap, this is why i'm making my own music player).

Yeah it might take a re-boot, but you can try logging out and back in on a live session after removing just the gnome-keyring package.

Or you can try just editing the exec line for chromium, that will definitely work.

There's been a LOT of updates to Excalibur since I made those iso's, might be better to just go for the new Devuan netinstall iso and choose Mate for the DE during that portion of the install, some things have been fixed in the newer versions.

Believe me, there was a lot that I wanted to do on those iso's, but I was committed to putting out something that was pure Devuan as-delivered without any of my hackiness, lol.

greenjeans · Desktop and Multimedia

That's awesome, I wasn't sure AlsaTune would work as-is because in my testing if there's any other soundserver installed it won't work properly, but I never tried it with JACK, just Pulse and Pipewire, and for those you would just lose everything except for a main volume control, and the EQ wouldn't work.

I just thought maybe there was some code you could re-use, but this is cool!

So with jack-bridge running you are able to adjust EQ settings in real-time? That's so groovy, I need to read more about Jack.

I made an experimental standalone EQ that i've never deployed at one point, and on it I added a button like you're describing to zero out everything on the EQ, but I never did one for the AT interface, that's not hard to implement and I agree it's a good idea.

Record feature/button? oooooh yeah, that would be slick and now it's got my creative side going, when I finish my other projects today i'll dig in and see. But of course feel free to hack on it in any way you see fit if you already have plans to implement it.

For your particular use-case with jack-bridge and working with music, are there any other features you can think of that would be helpful?

greenjeans · Devuan Derivatives

Oh no no no! @Ron the gnome-keyring is a completely different thing than the Devuan and Debian keyrings, you can't delete them as they are the keys to the repo, gnome-keyring is not even close to the same thing.

greenjeans · Desktop and Multimedia

I've been running Reaper and pure alsa for some years and I remember at least two hurdles. One was setting the default alsa output (card) the other was getting parallel sound outputs from Reaper and for example youtube.

Yep, I love me some pure alsa sound, but I don't enjoy trying to figure out all the myriad commands needed to try to get it to do more complex things. I sat down yesterday and finally worked out an update to my basic config files i've been using to allow multiple sources to play simultaneously, but of course .asoundrc is much larger now.

I also started work on a basic card-switcher GUI to add to AlsaTune... it's not hard to edit .asoundrc or .asound.conf and switch some 0's to 1's but just seems more elegant to offer a simple GUI solution.

greenjeans · Desktop and Multimedia

Nice work, very interesting stuff! @rations you should shoot me an e-mail sometime, i've been working on sound using Alsa without a sound server for a long time now and your solution of pairing it with Jack instead is interesting on a lot of levels.

For a GUI and in general for your project, you might want to take a look at AlsaTune, the source code is in the package and there may be elements of the code that might work for your GUI. If you're not familiar, it's a GUI for the alsa mixer and EQ with a system to save user EQ presets. Build thread : https://dev1galaxy.org/viewtopic.php?id=7278
Package: https://sourceforge.net/projects/vuu-do … /AlsaTune/

greenjeans · Devuan Derivatives

Are you planning to release a Vuu-do based on Excalibur?

I am at some point, for Vuu-do I stay off the cutting edge and go for pure stability, so i'm going to wait a while and let the dust settle before I start to build. Right now i'm still focused on the Daedalus versions as there's still work to be done, and also testing/bug-hunting/fixing stuff where i'm able to help in Devuan Excalibur so we can get it all dialed in and folks can roll up some new spins.

greenjeans · Devuan Derivatives

I'm confused. Then what caused the keyring not unlocked message?

You downloaded the Devuan-mate-mini, not one of the Vuu-do isos, the Devuan spins of Mate are just vanilla Devuan with no customization on my part, made from netinstalls and snapshotted along the way for testing purposes these last few months.

greenjeans · Devuan Derivatives

That's probably a typo, he must have meant 2013 as DDR3 did not exist in 2003 and nobody (except servers and maybe very high-end workstations) had 4 GB of RAM in 2003, 4 GB of DDR3 RAM was typical in 2013.

Or possibly the DDR3 is the typo, I do have a 2005 machine running Vuu-do out in my garage (only 1 gb of ram though), so I know it runs well on these old machines.

greenjeans · Devuan Derivatives

So if this problem pops up in a fresh install, all I need to do is delete gnome-keyring package? (I don't store passwords anywhere except on a piece of paper.)

Same here and that's what I did, no issues since then. It's not installed in the Vuu-do iso's, but the Devuan spins come with it by default.

The officially official Devuan Forum!

#151 Re: DIY » Simple card-switcher for ALSA » 2025-11-20 18:02:43

#152 Re: Hardware & System Configuration » (excalibur) strange messages during startup » 2025-11-20 17:55:34

#153 Re: Other Issues » Alsa errors during boot of Excalibur » 2025-11-20 17:52:24

#154 Re: Freedom Hacks » ALSA software mixer enabled by default in Debian/Devuan » 2025-11-20 17:12:55

#155 Re: Documentation » Desktop memory use in Excalibur » 2025-11-20 14:29:16

#156 Re: Documentation » Desktop memory use in Excalibur » 2025-11-19 23:45:25

#157 Re: Off-topic » Microsoft admits it's own AI is malware. » 2025-11-19 17:30:42

#158 Off-topic » Microsoft admits it's own AI is malware. » 2025-11-19 16:50:17

#159 Re: DIY » Simple card-switcher for ALSA » 2025-11-18 22:20:08

#160 Re: Devuan Derivatives » Installation failure (Excalibur) » 2025-11-18 21:49:10

#161 Re: DIY » Simple card-switcher for ALSA » 2025-11-18 01:04:54

#162 Re: DIY » Simple card-switcher for ALSA » 2025-11-17 22:30:46

#163 Re: Documentation » How to: Devuan 5 Daedalus an pipewire » 2025-11-17 22:20:03

#164 DIY » Simple card-switcher for ALSA » 2025-11-17 19:50:38

#165 Re: Documentation » How to: Devuan 5 Daedalus an pipewire » 2025-11-17 17:05:38

#166 Re: Desktop and Multimedia » ALSA+Jack system wide audio No pulseaudio or pipewire » 2025-11-17 03:00:12

#167 Re: Devuan Derivatives » Vuu-do Linux! New Openbox-64 iso's (1.0.7) up 2-02-18!! » 2025-11-16 18:13:42

#168 Re: Desktop and Multimedia » ALSA+Jack system wide audio No pulseaudio or pipewire » 2025-11-16 17:56:19

#169 Re: Devuan Derivatives » Vuu-do Linux! New Openbox-64 iso's (1.0.7) up 2-02-18!! » 2025-11-16 15:59:21

#170 Re: Desktop and Multimedia » ALSA+Jack system wide audio No pulseaudio or pipewire » 2025-11-16 15:54:59

#171 Re: Desktop and Multimedia » ALSA+Jack system wide audio No pulseaudio or pipewire » 2025-11-15 17:25:54

#172 Re: Devuan Derivatives » Vuu-do Linux! New Openbox-64 iso's (1.0.7) up 2-02-18!! » 2025-11-14 20:16:04

#173 Re: Devuan Derivatives » Vuu-do Linux! New Openbox-64 iso's (1.0.7) up 2-02-18!! » 2025-11-14 19:04:23

#174 Re: Devuan Derivatives » Vuu-do Linux! New Openbox-64 iso's (1.0.7) up 2-02-18!! » 2025-11-14 18:12:43

#175 Re: Devuan Derivatives » Vuu-do Linux! New Openbox-64 iso's (1.0.7) up 2-02-18!! » 2025-11-14 18:08:57

Board footer