[Pkg-alsa-devel] Bug#522072: Regression of dmix plugin setup

[zlinuxman at wowway.com]

> How did you checked this?

I interpret this to mean, "How do you know that dmix was not set up
during installation?"

The answer is that it didn't work.  Here's how I found out.  First,
after the install of the standard Debian GNOME desktop, I installed packages
gnome-audio libesd-alsa0 esound-clients, and esound.  I then configured
GNOME for system sounds.
(System -> Preferences -> Sound -> Sounds Tab, check boxes
"Enable software sound mixing (ESD)" and "play system sounds".)
Shutdown and reboot.  GNOME system sounds now works.  However,
as long as GNOME is running, any application which attempts to produce
sound directly through ALSA, as opposed to ESD, does not work.
It cannot open the audio device because ESD has it.
I run Debian, not Ubuntu.  But I found instructions on an Ubuntu forum
for how to enable dmix.  Since Ubuntu is based on Debian, it stands to
reason that if it's broken in Debian, it's probably broken in Ubuntu
as well.  Here's the link:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=32063

I followed the instructions on this web page to create
/etc/asound.conf, shutdown and reboot, and it worked.
It worked even without changing ESD to auto-spawn.

If dmix was enabled by default, then it would have just worked.
I wouldn't have had to create /etc/asound.conf.  It would have
already been there, and multiple opens of the audio device by multiple
applications would have worked without intervention.  That's how I know.