Andrea Olivato’s Blog

During the last few days I enjoyed myself destroying my gentoo gnome installation upgrading from 2.24 to newer 2.26 which is not included in default portage. I installed it from gnome overlay and as I was resolving dependancies and compiling a lot I decided to enable support for pulseaudio. I added the use flag to my make.conf and then emerged necessary packages.

As I’m not a multimedia man, I can’t really understand how and when pulseaudio has a better rending then other systems, however I really appreciate the possibility of setting each application volume, feature that I was missing before.

The only thing I still needed and that I did not find on the overlay was an applet to replace the deprecated gnome-volume-control. So I googled a bit and found gnome-pulse-applet project on google code.

Installation is very easy. It’s just a matter of

wget http://gnome-pulse-applet.googlecode.com/files/gnome-pulse-applet-0.2.tar.gz
tar xvf gnome-pulse-applet-0.2.tar.gz
cd gnome-pulse-applet-0.2
make
sudo make install

After compiling it, I had to restart my gnome environment as just killing and restarting the panel gave me some python errors.

Result is very nice, the applet is minimal and useful, it got some preferences in which you can choose the direction of the applet and the default output source. I really suggest every one using Pulseaudio to use this applet…