I am interested in getting a systray, audio volume control for OpenBSD. Many of the panels available in OpenBSD (pypanel, tint2, fbpanel, xfce4 panel, gnome panel) have Netwm compliant systrays that will accept a number of different applications depending on the users needs. I was going to float the idea here before putting it on the mailing lists.
The main issue is that none of the available volume controls for systray's utilize the sndio sink.
Volumeicon --> alsa or oss
gvolwheel --> alsa or oss
pnmixer --> alsa or pulse audio
Of the panels in OpenBSD that include volume control , work arounds have been needed for utilization.
fbpanel volume --> alsa or oss and currently none functional in OpenBSD. The fbpanel battery applet is also broken
xfce4_mixer --> gstreamer which works through a gstreamer oss plugin
gnome volume --> now with a pulse audio dependency in OpenBSD
Sndio is well documented
It
appears that the overall goal in OpenBSD is to utilize the sndio backend for audio applications. Some prominent applications, vlc and mplayer, have adapted the sndio backend.
I also found some python
scripts that generate an applet that could probably be tweaked to use mixerctl outputs.
So, there are a number of options, python script, quick and dirty adaptation of the FreeBSD gvolwheel to OpenBSD oss backend or the more time consuming, and presently beyond my capablities, task of writing a sndio patch for either volumeicon/gvolwheel.
Any suggestion on how to tackle this?