No Sound in X11 session in Slackware 13.1

aundy · 03-03-2011, 04:38 PM

My sound does not work in the X11 session. When I try to use alsamixer, it prints

Code:

cannot open mixer: No such file or directory

and when I try to play an audio file, I get

Code:

[oss.c:182] error: Can't open default sound device!
[audio.c:625] error: failed to open audio device
[audio.c:180] error: Unable to find a working output module in this list: alsa,oss
[audio.c:527] error: Failed to open audio output module
[mpg123.c:847] error: Failed to initialize output, goodbye.

However, if I switch to a virtual terminal all of this works. Also, if I attach to a tmux session that was started in one of the virtual terminals sound works, and even video will work if I set the DISPLAY variable to :0.0. This problem only occurs if I use a display manager, if I just start x11 with xinit, sound works.

vitorsgoncalves · 03-06-2011, 06:38 PM

Run the command lspci in a console and see if your sound device is listed there.

kingbeowulf · 03-06-2011, 07:54 PM

aundy,
Did you run /usr/sbin/alsaconf as root, and check /etc/modprobe.d/sound.conf
? KDE will sometime pick the wrong default device, so you need to check that. What desktop are you using? The ones provided in a standard Slackware installation (KDE, Xfce, blackbox, fluxbox, etc) have always worked for me. If you rolled your own X11 session, you may have forgotten something in the configuration. Did you do a partial or a full Slackware installation? Did you set /etc/rc.d/rc.alsa as executable?

aundy · 03-07-2011, 11:34 PM

I have never run alsaconf, and there is no file called /etc/modprobe.d/sound.conf.
Maybe the display manager is picking the wrong default sound device, how would I check this? I did a full slackware installation, but I have done some modifications to the system, so maybe a reinstall would fix this problem.

Also sound doesn't work if I use xdm or kdm, but I if start a kde session or an xfce session manually using xinit (as a non-root user) then sound will work. So I guess it has something to do with the display manager.

EDIT: I tried running alsaconf as root, and that didn't fix it, but I noticed that if I run alsamixer as root the problem goes away.

H_TeXMeX_H · 03-08-2011, 03:11 AM

After running 'alsamixer' as root, run 'alsactl store' to store the settings.