aptitude remove pulseaudio

[pj at pjb.com.au]

Greetings.

On debian stable, I tried:
  prompt> aptitude why pulseaudio
  i   gnome-orca        Depends    speech-dispatcher
  i A speech-dispatcher Recommends pulseaudio
  prompt> aptitude why speech-dispatcher
  i   gnome-orca Depends speech-dispatcher

Unfortunately, although speech-dispatcher only "Recommends"
pulseaudio, it refuses to install unless pulseaudio is present.
Is this a bug? speech-dispatcher used to work before pulseaudio...
So, as I don't use gnome-orca or speech-dispatcher, I did:
  # aptitude remove speech-dispatcher pulseaudio gnome-orca

This also removed lots of things like liblouis2, which I also don't use
but I don't see why louis should depend on pulseaudio ...

So now things work, but there are lots of spurious error messages like
  prompt> echo gloop | espeak
  ALSA lib pcm.c:2217:(snd_pcm_open_noupdate) Unknown PCM cards.pcm.rear
  ALSA lib pcm.c:2217:(snd_pcm_open_noupdate) Unknown PCM cards.pcm.center_lfe
  ALSA lib pcm.c:2217:(snd_pcm_open_noupdate) Unknown PCM cards.pcm.side
  ALSA lib pulse.c:243:(pulse_connect) PulseAudio: Unable to connect: Connection refused
  ALSA lib pulse.c:243:(pulse_connect) PulseAudio: Unable to connect: Connection refused
  ALSA lib pcm_dmix.c:957:(snd_pcm_dmix_open) The dmix plugin supports only playback stream

Is this a bug? ALSA used to work before pulseaudio...

Gnome seems to me more and more like windoze:
totalitarian, and destroying everything but itself. 
Perhaps good intentions aren't everything.

Anyway,  aptitude remove pulseaudio   is not as brutal as
  cd /usr/bin; rm -f pulseaudio ; touch pulseaudio ; chmod 555 pulseaudio
and it does work; but not as cleanly as I hoped.

Peter Billam

http://www.pjb.com.au      pj at pjb.com.au     (03) 6278 9410
"Follow the charge, not the particle."  --  Richard Feynman
 from The Theory of Positrons, Physical Review, 1949