GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 500610
a trace on pidgin told me to report a bug here, and here it is.
Last modified: 2007-12-06 09:31:32 UTC
(23:12:10) jabber: Sending (ssl): <message type='chat' id='purplee49c0051' to='kumailht@gmail.com/Talk.v104FD00A2FF'><active xmlns='http://jabber.org/protocol/chatstates'/></message> (23:12:10) gstreamer: Resource busy or not available. (23:12:10) gstreamer: Internal GStreamer error: state change failed. Please file a bug at http://bugzilla.gnome.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=GStreamer. (23:12:10) GLib-GObject: invalid uninstantiatable type `(null)' in cast to `GstObject' I thought I'd do what it says. Ubuntu Gutsy, everything up to date. ...PulseAudio sound server. --wait, is pidgin making assumptions? Should they be telling me to send bugs here? What is the relationship between GStreamer and PulseAudio?
The log shows two error messages generated by GStreamer. The first one is the 'proper' one. The second one is the generic fallback one that the user should never really get to see, and the way it's meant is that you should only really file a bug if your application shows you this in an error dialog :) Also, usually the application resets the pipeline to NULL state when it encounters the first error message, which would flush/discard all following error messages (since the first is the 'most precise' one). I don't know if pidgin fails to do this properly, or if it lists the second error message on purpose here, but it does not really look like a bug in GStreamer. As for the problem itself: the 'Resource busy or not available' error might be due to pidgin trying to open an audio device directly instead of going via pulseaudio (which has this device already open for its own use). You might be able to fix this by playing with the pidgin configuration settings or the GNOME settings via System => Preferences => Sound. If this doesn't help, you might be able to find more support in the pidgin or ubuntu fora.