SysAdmin Adventures » SBo http://blog.tpa.me.uk Tech notes from a Systems Administrator Mon, 31 Oct 2011 11:09:09 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3 Pidgin making no sound in Slackware 13.0 http://blog.tpa.me.uk/2009/09/10/pidgin-making-no-sound-in-slackware-13-0/ http://blog.tpa.me.uk/2009/09/10/pidgin-making-no-sound-in-slackware-13-0/#comments Thu, 10 Sep 2009 12:03:33 +0000 Zordrak http://blog.tpa.me.uk/?p=132 This is a simple one.

Pidgin uses GStreamer for producing sound (don’t ask me why.. I think it’s a bit daft too). GStreamer relies on plugins for pretty much all sound formats.

GStreamer plugins come in three categories:

  • gst-plugins-good (high-quality LGPL plugins)
  • gst-plugins-bad (reasonable-quality plugins with free distribution licences)
  • gst-plugins-ugly (good-quality plugins that have licence/distribution issues)

Pidgin’s default sound scheme uses WAV files and therefore needs the GStreamer WAV plugin which is available in gst-plugins-good. I have absolutely no idea whatsoever why Slackware 13.0 ships with GStreamer but without gst-plugins-good, however this is not a problem because SlackBuilds.org solves everything:

# yes | sbopkg -i gst-plugins-good

(you do use sbopkg don’t you?)

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