No sound. Alsa is awol

[pottzie]

I don't have any sound on my PC. Bash shows alsa installed at /usr/sbin/alsa /usr/share/alsa, but alsamixer draws a blank ("command not found"). Saw a thread where it said to run "sudo apt-get install xfce4-mixer xfce4-volumed,"
http://linuxbbq.org/bbs/viewtopic.php?f ... alsa#p3883
and after running that and opening the new app, I get a panel saying that "GStreamer was unable to detect any sound devices. Some sound system specific GStreamer packages may be missing. It may also be a permissions problem."

lspci shows as:
00:11.5 Multimedia audio controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT8233/A/8235/8237 AC97 Audio Controller (rev 50)

[pidsley]

What BBQ spin are you using? Is this a new install, or an update, and has sound ever worked?

Do you get "command not found" or "no mixer found"? What happens if you try

Code: Select all

sudo alsamixer

What do you get from the following commands:

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apt-cache policy alsa-utils
aplay -l
groups
uname -a

[pottzie]

It's LXDE, installed about 6 weeks ago. I haven't had sound for a while, this PC has an older AMD cpu that plays video pretty crudely, slow loading speeds, etc, so I haven't used video that much, hence the "no biggie" attitude on getting sound working. Just decided to turn on the "html5" option in Youtube, so now I might as well get sound going.

Code: Select all

larry@shmuctbox:~$ sudo alsamixer
[sudo] password for larry: 
cannot open mixer: No such file or directory
larry@shmuctbox:~$ sudo su
root@shmuctbox:/home/larry# apt-cache policy alsa-utils
alsa-utils:
  Installed: 1.0.27.1-1
  Candidate: 1.0.27.1-1
  Version table:
 *** 1.0.27.1-1 0
        500 http://http.debian.net/debian/ unstable/main i386 Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status
root@shmuctbox:/home/larry# aplay -l
aplay: device_list:268: no soundcards found...
root@shmuctbox:/home/larry# groups
root
root@shmuctbox:/home/larry# uname -a
Linux shmuctbox 3.9-7.towo-siduction-686 #1 SMP PREEMPT Fri Jun 21 16:03:03 UTC 2013 i686 GNU/Linux

[pidsley]

I had a similar problem with Trollinger earlier today. Try editing /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf, as described by dkeg in this post: http://crunchbang.org/forums/viewtopic. ... 24#p316924 (you don't have to use vi, you can use your favorite editor). remember to reboot after you save the file

[vic]

thanks for the link pidsley, got sound again:)

[dkeg]

thanks pids, glad this was helpful. Before I even realized what was going on, I had three spins affected ...

[pidsley]

Thank you for the fix dkeg -- how did you manage to figure that out?

[dkeg]

I noticed the strange process in pstree and htop. it was sh-modprobe-sh-modprobe-sh-modprobe (something like that). in htop i could see more detail which gave me where to start looking. At this point I still had not even realized it was alsa related. Finall I noticed my volume in conky was as Mute. So it was through trying to figure out why that happened I finally eventually linked the two!

When I couldn't run alsamixer with the result of no soundcard, that is when I went into the alsa conf file. that's when I recognized the install scripts that I saw in htop. So to experiment I commented them out. Still really hadn't confirmed the two were linked. Had two things I was working toward, getting rid of these phantom processes and getting sound back. Commenting out these lines, the primary was to get rid of the processes. When I rebooted it was a bonus to had sound back, and the processes were gone!

I was trying to figure out more of what happened before i posted something, then dude in cb forum had similar issue. the fix working for him was justification that it wasn't just me. And now I see it's spreading.

[pidsley]

^Interesting. Nice catch. Maybe you should post a note in "upgrade warnings" -- it appears to happen with an upgrade to a 3.9-7 kernel.

[dkeg]

Ok will do. I'll be out today, but will do a write up tonight

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