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Linux sound - bizarre

malbui

Beauf
malbui
Joined
Nov 8, 2004
Messages
4,682
My main Linux box is an old P3 running Fedora Core 3. I mainly use it for coding and testing and so haven't worried too much about cleaning up some of the peripheral issues remaining from the installation. I did have some free time this morning, though, so I thought I'd at least try to get the sound working so I can have some tunes while I work.

The soundcard was correctly recognised, so I spent a while playing with the configuration utilities and tweaking ALSA, but I couldn't get a peep out of it. Then, after an nth reboot, it occurred to me to boot a Knoppix CD: if I could get it to play sound like that, I could see what drivers it was using and maybe get a new point of attack. Knoppix booted OK and I got an mp3 to play, but a look at the boot log showed that it was using the same drivers as the FC installation. Hmmm.

Then I rebooted back into FC and bugger me if the sound wasn't working.

I have no idea what could have provoked this. It certainly wasn't my expertise.
 
jjramsey said:
It's been a while, but I think that you have to check-off something in the GNOME preferences to turn on sound. It may also be that ALSA has the sound muted, and you can fix that by running alsamixer in a terminal, and then typing "alsactl store". This thread on the Fedora test list may help you:

https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-test-list/2004-April/msg03078.html
Click to expand...

many years ago on a debian install I ran into a situation where the card itself had been muted. I didn't (and don't) use a GUI, but there were command line tools for controlling the mixer on the card. Once I ran that and put the volume up it worked fine.

I wonder if Knoppix has a rc script that sets the mixer volume to a certain level and that's why the problem got fixed.
 
kevin said:
I wonder if Knoppix has a rc script that sets the mixer volume to a certain level and that's why the problem got fixed.
Click to expand...
I was wondering about something like that. But as I understand it Knoppix runs entirely from the CD into memory and doesn't touch the hard disk unless you actively mount a partition as R/W and start editing files. Hence my bafflement. But whatever the cause the end result is what I wanted and I've now got Skype and music running on that box.
 
I had similar issues on my install. I opened the terminal program and used aumix. I found several of the volume controolers were set completely down. (To the left actually)

I am still having issues anytime I logout of XWindows and log back in, whether with the same account or a different one, the system sounds no longer work. I have to disable, re-enable, and reboot in order to get them working again. I'm using Gnome for my desktop in FC3. Any ideas?
 
My only idea, after a number of years of using various Linux distros on a variety of machines, is that sound is still a bit broken.
 
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