Debian Sarge -- Sound Spontaneously Broken?

Ehuwiko · 08-12-2004, 08:24 PM

I installed Debian Sarge with the new installer a few days back, and everything went fine. I installed ALSA, got it configured, started up trusty ol' fluxbox and blasted some music via XMMS. A few reboots here and there, always worked fine. So just a few minutes ago I decided to try our KDE 3.2. Well, as soon as I start it up I'm greeted with a hideous scratching noise coming from my speakers. So I kill X, and try playing a few files with mpg123. Same hideous noise. So, I restart. Boot up, play a song with mpg123 before even starting X. Same Hideous Noise. If you don't mind me asking, just what in the hell did KDE manage to do that is screwing up the entire sound server?

trickykid · 08-12-2004, 08:51 PM

Moved: Better suited in our Debian forum.

zero79 · 08-13-2004, 06:44 PM

you may need to just do a cold reboot (power the system completely down, wait 30 seconds, power back up). the components on the sound card may have accumulated excess static electricity. there is no electrical path for the energy to discharge while the system is on. the 30 seconds should be enough time for any extra accumulated charge to disipate.

Ehuwiko · 08-14-2004, 08:53 AM

That wasn't it, but thanks for the suggestion. It's some strange glitch with KDE's aRts sound system and ALSA, as far as I can tell. I had the OSS modules for my sound card blacklisted with discover so they didn't auto-load and perform freaky voodoo magic with ALSA. After removing the blacklist and restarting, OSS worked fine. So I added the blacklist back, and restarted again. ALSA works fine logged into any other window manger, but as soon as I load KDE up it messes up ALSA for the entire system.

I tried going in and frigging around with KDE's sound settings, and with the ALSA mixer, but it was a no go, still just static from KDE. Hell, I even tried uninstalling aRts and it was still messed up. So I'll guess I'll just do what I've always done, avoid KDE like the plague and stick to something reasonable like Fluxbox.

My motherboard is an ABIT KV7, using the VIA KT600 chipset. The onboard audio(that I'm using right now) has 3 analog ouputs for 5.1, line in, mic, and spdif. It uses the snd-via82xx audio module in ALSA. If anyone has had this or similar problems in any Debian release with this same audio chipset, I'd appreciate any solutions you may have.

Cheers, and remember:
Weasels always make good refrigerator magnets.