Comment 10 for bug 1178272

On Tue, Sep 03, 2013 at 10:37:23PM -0000, Rüdiger Kupper wrote:
> Hm, to my knowledge Lubuntu does not come with pulseaudio nor gstreamer. The standard install relies on audio applications that use plain ALSA. Try installing from a Lubuntu live CD.
> It's certainly hard to choose which (meta-)package should pull in gstreamer1.0-alsa. But some package should include it, otherwise Lubuntu users will end up without it and have the problems described above. It's the link between ALSA and gstreamer, so it could come with one of the packages that deliver ALSA or gstreamer. There's probably no perfect answer here. It could just be included in the standard Lubuntu install, but the Lubuntu people opt for simplicity and use direct ALSA.
>
> However, a typical scenario is as follows:
> You install Lubuntu from a Live CD. You find a selection of slim audio software like audacious. However, you miss your rhythmbox/banshee/whatever. You install rhythmbox/banshee/whatever. It does not work, because there is no gstreamer. You google a bit and learn that the gstreamer plugins come with ubuntu-restricted-extras. You install it, but your rhythmbox/banshee/whatever still does not work, because there is no ALSA sink. You google a bit more but find no answer. You end up writing a bug report on launchpad ;-).
>
> Anyway, it might even have helped if gstreamer printed a proper error
> message (like "no sink found") instead of trying to use the jack sink,
> which is probably the least likely to exist. I don't know where's the
> best place of doing it, but somehow it should be guaranteed that there
> is at least one sink present when gstreamer is installed.

There is at least one sink present (the jack one). Banshee depends on
gstreamer1.0-pulseaudio | gstreamer1.0-audiosink, and the latter package is a
virtual package that can be satisfied by any audio sink. In addition, it
recommends gstreamer1.0-pulseaudio, so it should be installed by default (but
will work even if you tell apt not to install gstreamer1.0-pulseaudio, but in
that case you're responsible for choosing another audiosink).

The issue here is that gstreamer1.0-pulseaudio is also useless because you don't
use pulseaudio.

Since this issue is more specific to Lubuntu installations, I'd be tempted to
slap gstreamer1.0-alsa onto lubuntu-desktop, but it looks like none of the
default media players even use gstreamer. I'll stick lubuntu-meta onto this bug
anyway, hopefully someone more acquianted with lubuntu would be able to come up
with a better solution.

  affects ubuntu/lubuntu-meta

--
Kind regards,
Loong Jin