audio stopped working on Etch with new kernel upgrade
 

It was working before. With oss I think.

I think it stopped working when I did a kernel upgrade. I went from 2.6.12 to 2.6.15. Possibly related to udev replacing hotplug. gxine was reporting that it couldn't find /dev/dsp, and rightfully so, since it's not there (I'm guessing it was there before the upgrade).

In late-night hair-pulling frustration I wanted to try vlc, but it wasn't available for Sarge... so I upgraded Sid and installed vlc. Still no audio though.

I thought maybe I needed to use alsa, so just to see if I'd get lucky I tried installing: alsa-base vlc-plugin-alsa alsa-utils aumix. Still no good. aumix won't even start -- it just says "aumix: error opening mixer".

Trying out the tools in alsa-utils, speaker-test seems to think it's playing test sounds for me, but nothing is coming out of the speakers.

I ran alsamixer as root, turned a bunch of settings up, but that didn't seem to make a difference.

Any tips welcome. For desktop use, I just grabbed an Ubuntu cd, so may give that a try instead of trying to fiddle with all this desktop stuff on Debian.

run alsaconf

*That's* the command I was looking for. Thank you dracae. Dunno how I didn't see it listed in "dpkg -L alsa-utils".

Well, now, I don't know which of those alsa packages I installed were required or not, but it works now.

It still looks to me like Ubuntu does a good job with the desktop stuff, but boy that alsaconf worked great.

By the way dracae, you know, since you're here so often helping folks out, we *could* just set up a cot for you in the LQ boiler room. Maybe a small refrigerator too... you'd never even have to leave! ;)

Ha I know this joy in linux when you find THE command you were looking for :)


vlc is available for Sarge though!

++

Whoops. -- typo. I meant "vlc isn't available for Etch".

I'm just so used to Sarge being Testing. :)