For those who don’t follow the Cooker list, it’s recently been announced that Mandriva will switch to using PulseAudio as its default sound server for all desktops in the next release.

Several other distros have announced plans to do this, and Fedora has been doing it since Fedora 8, but it’s rather more complex for Mandriva as we support both KDE and GNOME desktops. However, testing indicates that we can manage a good KDE implementation, so we’re going to go with it.

For anyone who hasn’t yet come across PulseAudio, it’s a sound server. This means it sits between applications and your actual hardware sound output devices, accepting audio from applications and mixing it together and potentially processing it in other ways before sending it out to the device(s).

More Details here