Weird Problem with Sound
 

Hello everyone,

I have a weird problem with sound in Debian. I did a net install of Debian Sarge using the new beta installer. Everything worked great and installed correctly. Right after the install was finished (without reboot), I logged in as root and added my own user account to the "audio" group and edited a few minor things in XFree86Config-4 file. Then I started X and the sound worked fine. There was sound while KDE was "initializing peripherals" and there was sound inside KDE (e.g. minimizing a window, etc.). Then I exited X, logged out of root, logged in using my own user account, started X again and sound was again fine.

But once I rebooted the first time, the sound stopped working in KDE. When KDE starts and gets to the part of "initializing peripherals", I get this quick screech sound in my speakers, like KDE was trying to play the usual startup tune, but failed. Sound effects (like minimizing a window) didn't work anymore (yes, the effects are set to be on). I've played with the settings in the Control Center relating to Sound, but none of them did anything to help. This is true of both the root account and my own user account. I don't think I changed any settings to make this happen.

The weird thing is that sound works fine if I play an MP3 in XMMS. But none of the KDE sounds work. I'm pretty new to linux so I don't know what could be wrong. I don't think my sound card is configured wrong since XMMS can play MP3's. And KDE sounds did work the first time I logged in after install. But KDE sounds stopped working since my first reboot and hasn't come back. Any ideas on what I could to to fix this?

As an aside, I'm running the default 2.4.22-386 kernel from the net install and I'm running Debian inside a VMWare virtual machine (host is Windows XP, guest is Debian). I know running Debian inside VMWare is not the best thing, but I don't want to install Linux on my "real" system until I'm relatively proficient at it.

Thanks for any help in advance!

Eric

that screeching sound makes me think the sound card was looking at the wrong area of shared memory. You probably know this but, the OS and peripherals agree on a certain section of RAM that they'll use to talk to each other. In the case of a sound card, the OS writes the music to be played to that area of memory and the sound card reads it. When the card is finished it generates an interrupt.

So, it sounds to me that the OS wrote some music to location A and the sound card tried to play what was in location B and of course it was random garbage.

If you were using windows I'd tell you to look at the DMA settings for the sound card. I don't know what to suggest for linux though, but maybe this idea will get you started.