[Mageia-dev] no sound

Sat May 5 14:37:20 CEST 2012

'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:
+  Tribalogic Limited http://www.tribalogic.net/
+Open Source:
+  Mageia Contributor http://www.mageia.org/
+  PulseAudio Hacker http://www.pulseaudio.org/
+  Trac Hacker http://trac.edgewall.org/
+