[Mageia-dev] no sound

[Colin Guthrie]

'Twas brillig, and Felix Miata at 05/05/12 11:43 did gyre and gimble:
>> Can you clarify "sound does not work"?
> 
> Nothing but background hum coming from connected AV amp connected speakers.
> 
>>  Are you referring to HDMI sound
>> or regular built in sound?
> 
> Surely there exists no motherboard with NForce2 chipset and AGP slot
> filled with rv200 that also has HDMI?

I have no idea. I'm afraid I don't spend my evenings memorising the
multitude of different hardware in the world so I can automatically know
this stuff. This is why I ask for clarification.

> 00:06.0 Multimedia audio controller: nVidia Corporation NForce2 AC97
> Audio Controler (MCP) (rev a1)
> 
> If so please do attach the output from "pacmd ls"
> 
> No package named pacmd.
> # urpmi pulseaudio-utils
> ...
> # pacmd ls
> No PulseAudio daemon running, or not running as session daemon.

Did you run it as root? If so, run it as a regular user instead. You may
with to run "pactl stat" first if you are in a console as this will
trigger an autospawn of pulseaudio if it's not already running (pacmd
does not trigger autospawn as it's a debugging tool not a regular client).

> # startx

Is this how you start X always? If so you should know from previous
discussions that this behaviour isn't really officially recommended as
it does not allow for proper user session tracking and thus has various
permissions related issues. It *should* work most of the time, but it is
highly recommended that you use a proper DM to login.

If this is a simple permissions issue, then you can test by running
"loginctl" before startx and noting if your sessions is listed. If it
is, it should have a number next to it (e.g. 1) and if it is listed you
can do: "loginctl session-status 1" (or whatever the number). This
should confirm that the session is active. When the session is active
your user should be listed in the ACL for the sound device nodes
(getfacl /dev/snd/pcm*).

After issuing startx, try the same commands and, in particular, make
sure your session is still active. I've tried to ensure that it is kept
active (i.e. there is no VT switch), but this isn't 100% reliable.
startx should print out warnings when things don't work however.

> (KDE menu has no selection to configure computer. Without it there's no
> way I know how to manage systemd like I could with sysvinit.)

I've no idea about this sorry. You should report it as a separate bug tho'.


> # mcc
> bash: mcc: command not found
> # chkconfig --list
> ...
> alsa               0:off    1:off    2:off    3:off    4:off    5:off   
> 6:off    7:off
> ...
> numlock            0:off    1:off    2:on    3:on    4:on    5:on   
> 6:off    7:on
> partmon            0:off    1:off    2:off    3:off    4:off    5:off   
> 6:off    7:off
> resolvconf         0:off    1:off    2:off    3:off    4:off    5:off   
> 6:off    7:off
> ...
> sound              0:off    1:off    2:on    3:on    4:on    5:on   
> 6:off    7:off

In this case, the alsa+sound sysvinit scripts are fully overriden by
systemd so the chkconfig output is not actually relevant (see below for
my comments about the Troubleshooting section's outdated advice)

> # systemctl list-unit-files
> alsa-restore.service static
> alsa-store.service static
> alsa.service masked
> ...
> sound.service masked
> ...
> sound.target static
> ...
> 
> What to do?

Yup that looks as expected.

Try running the commands above to debug user permissions. I suspect this
is where the problem lies but I could be wrong.

"pacmd ls" output from inside X should work fine as PA will have been
started by then and it won't need to be autospawned.

>>>  2:
>>>  (Non-PAE, IIRC) P4 2.6GHz CPU
>>>  Intel 865G pci 0x2572 video&  ICH5 chipset
>>>  KDE bling disabled
>>>  x11-driver-video-intel-2.19.0-1.mga2
>>>  No post-install visual fault found running intel driver
>>>  Sound does not work
> 
>> AS above
> 
> Nothing but background hum coming from connected AV amp connected speakers.
> 
> Surely there exists no motherboard with 865/ICH5 chipset and empty AGP
> slot that also has HDMI?

Again, I don't know. I don't study this stuff and know all the different
chipsets and motherboard configurations. Sorry if this disappoints you,
but I've got better and more interesting things to spend my time on!

> 00:1f.5 Multimedia audio controller: Inter Corporation 82801EB/ER
> (KCH5/ICH5R) AC'97 Ausio Controller (rev 02)
> 
> # pacmd ls
> (17.9k attachment)

There is no attachment I can see for this output...



> # mcc
> ...
> 'Your card currently uses the ALSA "snd_intel8x0" droiver (the default
> driver for your card is "snd_intel8x0)'
> PulseAudio enabled
> Use Glitch-Free mode enabled
> (advanced)
> Troubleshooting
> The classic bug sound tester is to run the following commands:

Wow, this info is horribly out of date....

> - "grep sound-slot /etc/modprobe.conf" will tell you what driver it
> currently uses

Not really true. It's all done via udev these days. There should be no
need for any manual configuration in 99.9% of cases. "sound-slot"
arguments are not even read these days.

> - "/sbin/chkconfig --list sound" and "/sbin/chkconfig --list alsa" will
> tell you if sound and alsa services are configured to be run on initlevel 3

Not really relevant these days.

> - "aumix -q" will tell you if the sound volume is muted or not
> - "/sbin/fuser -v /dev/dsp" will tell which program uses the sound card.

Both these commands are very out of date. They do not deal with ALSA
cards but OSS drivers... that's been old for years :s


We need to update these strings (and I think there was a bug about this
somewhere that I've forgotten about :s) but I fear it's too late for
mga2 due to i18n freeze.


> Logging in from KDM doesn't improve anything. In fact, after the desktop
> seems fully populated, there's a long pause before the panel populates
> the tray and it's possible to do anything other than look at the screen.
> 
> 
> Oh, and on all systems https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=283366 makes
> KDE4 virtually useless.

It's possibly the same issue as the delay itself.

Col


-- 

Colin Guthrie
colin(at)mageia.org
http://colin.guthr.ie/

Day Job:
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  Trac Hacker http://trac.edgewall.org/