Fri, 07 Dec 2007
Ekiga, PulseAudio, and D-Bus
It seems that more and more applications start using D-Bus for communication, so it is time to get ones feet wet with the D-Bus programming. Fedora 8 has PulseAudio enabled by default, which conflicts with Ekiga because of this ALSA bug (see also the related PulseAudio issue).
My solution is to suspend the PulseAudio server temporarily when the call is being made. This has an additional effect that you don't need to find where the music player window is hidden in order to mute it (so something similar would be usable even later, after the above two issues are fixed).
Anyway, here is my Ekiga PulseAudio suspender.
Written in Perl, needs Net::DBus from CPAN,
and the pacmd(1) and notify-send(1) commands.
Run it on background from your session startup script (or even from the
terminal inside your desktop session). It will mute your PulseAudio server when the call is being received (or when an outgoing
call is being made), and enables it back after the call is finished.
Beware that ekiga is not compiled with D-Bus support in
Fedora 8. New source
and x86_64 binary
packages are available, problem reported as
bug #410471.
Comments are welcome.