Installed/removed pulseaudio, lost ALSA
 

At one point, I thought I needed pulseaudio for sound, so I messed around with installing it, even though at the time I had ALSA installed. (suffice to say, I know very little about linux sound). Pulseaudio never did work, I removed it with aptitude. But now ALSA seems to reach to pulseaudio for some reason.

More confusing is that there are no "alsa" looking processes in ps -A. But apparently, the basics are there
There's only one thing in init.d that seems relevent to alsa:
But doing this does not help anything. Does anyone know what to do from here?

And because I'm curious, how come I get sound from Flash Player and Audacity with no problem? Thanks for any and all help.

Maybe it would help to purge pulseaudio, and then reconfigure alsa-base.

The other thing you way wish to do is use a mixer (kmix, alsamixer, or xmixer) to check your volume levels, especially if you're getting sound from some things but not others.

Thank you for the reply, Mark :}

I tried what you suggested. However the problem persists
The alsa reconfigure does not really ask anything, I assume it should? I'll keep messing with it, maybe uninstall/reinstall alsa? It just seems odd that the pulse stuff is still there, for other programs too:

Maybe there are various other pulseaudio packages that are still on your system. Perhaps try apt-get purge pulseaudio* (or, and probably even better, aptitude purge pulseaudio*) to remove any other pulseaudio packages on your system.

Howdy,
I did an apt-get purge for the pulseaudio and even alsa base as well... then put alsa back on. It still does not work right,
Still not sure what to do, open to suggestions. Thanks again, jefm

Check what pulseaudio packages you have remaining on your system with:

I've just looked at my own system,which does not use pulse audio.
Although it does have one pulseaudio package which is libpulse0.

So if the above command shows that you have pulse packages installed,try using aptitude to 'simulate' removing the packages with something like:

You can then see what the effects are before you actually start removing packages from the system.
Also you don't mention which branch of Debian you are using?.
It would be useful to know to help setting up Alsa.
I'd suggest adding it to your profile.

Hello Trooper,
thanks for the reply. I did the dpkg line and apparently I'd missed the server, somehow:

I went ahead and removed it. However, I still seem to call pulse somehow (I even rebooted, lol)

I left the libpulse0 because it threatened to break libxine and a couple other things.
Something, somewhere still looks for pulseaudio. I really need to study this sound system stuff.
I'm on Debian Lenny btw, I also updated my sig accordingly. Thanks for the help!

Hey jefm,

Let's try another way.
As you are using Lenny,you can run alsaconf as root.
When asked select the appropriate sound device and let alsaconf configure it for you.
Once this is finished run alsamixer and make sure none of the volume settings are muted.You can then store the settings with alsactl store.

Once the above is finished try running speaker-test,see if you hear any output.

Hi and thanks again for the help. I tried what you said, things looked really good for a moment, but then got familiar:
(Graphics... It found an Intel 82801G and legacy ISA... I went with Intel. I let alsaconf modify /etc/modprobe.d/sound, after which it said the sound card is configured. Back to text)
I am lost... I think I might toss this to the Alsa mailing list and see what they say. Thanks again for the help and all the handy command line tools!

Sorry i couldn't help further.
If you find the solution please post it here.

Not sure if you have checked your /etc/asound.conf file, but I remember when configuring PA you have to set the default devices through this (or alternatively on a per-user basis in ~/.asoundrc). Hopefully you've fixed the issue by now (a year later), but if not try checking that.


Cheers,
Jordan