Pulseaudio, NFS and Other shit

Before I successfully fix something, there comes a post where I whine, you’ve been warned.

With every new distro I have strange quests to achieve, with OpenSUSE I was hellbent on getting VIA to work, with Laptop running Mandriva I have new mission in life: Using the Desktop’s soundcard remotely to output audio being played on laptop.

Now twisted but simple as it sounds, Hunter helped me fix the shorewall (Mandriva’s inbuilt firewall) to mount the music directory via NFS, but like always, it’s this one question he asks me in the end, that brings the whole deal crumbling down, apparently NFS can’t mount NTFS partitions.

Then I dived into configuring SAMBA, successful, file transfers and access work but then a ssh’d amarok from my laptop don’t play local files, neither the other way around, installing xine-smb also didn’t help, nor did the Amarok XUL remote script, it even had a bug that I won’t bother to report.

Then out of exasperation, I googled “remotely use soundcard”, I came across an article that talked about something similar, I knew pulseaudio could do what i wanted it to, but how? what commands? where’s the frickin GUI?

The pulseaudio wiki is hopeless for somewhat-intermediate users like me, I stormed into their IRC chatroom, the first nick that responded told me about loading modules… he didn’t tell me how to.

Just when i left the window inactive and got to look at facebook, another kind soul told me about a GTK application called Padevchooser. DAMN, bless that soul! I had music playing on the desktop’s soundcard in less than 2mins.