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I bought a VC66-C. Nice little box. All I did was move my disk to it and everything worked, except for the wifi. OK, I'll deal with that later and just plug a USB dongle in. So, I did an upgrade and a reboot, and then the sound died. We're 19 years into the 21st century and sound still dies? le sigh
So, does anyone have a recommended path to take for this to get the sound back? Sound Preferences says that the Built-In Audio Is Disabled. I don't have a clue how to proceed from here. It's certainly not disabled in the BIOS. Everything I find online is related to ALSA and none of it works. Please help.
UPDATE:
I have it working now. The quick solution is below. No .asoundrc is needed, and no files are needed in /etc/modprobe.d. Just make the change below and it works.
Code:
1. Open /etc/default/grub
2. Add: GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="i915.alpha_support=1"
3. Run sudo update-grub to make the change effective
4. Reboot
Last edited by Quakeboy02; 06-13-2019 at 01:47 PM.
Some more info. Note where I've highlighted in red "Active Profile: off". That has to be related to the problem. What do I actually do about it to enable the profile? Or is that just a symptom and not the problem?
ADDED: OK, I just noticed what that means. All the devices are set to "available: no". So, is that a hardware problem, a software setting, or something else/somewhere else.
More info: I've just hooked my laptop up to the TV with the same HDMI cable. The sound from the laptop to the TV is fine. So, the problem is somewhere in the sound setup in the Linux box.
If you run pulse operations as root (sudo or otherwise) it might have changed the "users" permissions. You can chown to get the permissions back. Which used to be /run/user/$UID/pulse*. And some of that might be the version of pulse in question. In days of old it would create /.pulse* things and those would trump any $HOME/.pulse* things and block audio. Although things moved to $HOME/.config/* and such. A reinstallation should fix it... oi... Still kind of sad that twenty years later, most of our audio things are command line based. Even jackdbus (jack2) requires some CLI parameters before it awakes from the dead.
And then there's hardware quirks, like a 3.5mm plug being partially out. Or HDMI to a DVI adapter that lacks audio signal. It's not common for the soundcard to fail, unless other things failed too (lightning / PSU / ...). They can be disabled in the bios/uefi to "force" use of another device (cause windows is stupid). But computers are pretty stupid, they only do what you (or others) tell them to do. And they come with soo many audio devices now, modems, webcams, motherboards, video cards, bluetooth, ... It's probably just trying to use the default sound output, which is obviously your webcam (it has no output, well, most of them anyway).
Send any suspend commands to the device(s)? Not sure if it's NOT suspended when you try to use them. Also interesting that the actual hardware is NOT the SINK (output/speakers). But the SOURCE (input/microphone).
If you run pulse operations as root (sudo or otherwise) it might have changed the "users" permissions. You can chown to get the permissions back. Which used to be /run/user/$UID/pulse*. And some of that might be the version of pulse in question. In days of old it would create /.pulse* things and those would trump any $HOME/.pulse* things and block audio. Although things moved to $HOME/.config/* and such. A reinstallation should fix it... oi... Still kind of sad that twenty years later, most of our audio things are command line based. Even jackdbus (jack2) requires some CLI parameters before it awakes from the dead.
And then there's hardware quirks, like a 3.5mm plug being partially out. Or HDMI to a DVI adapter that lacks audio signal. It's not common for the soundcard to fail, unless other things failed too (lightning / PSU / ...). They can be disabled in the bios/uefi to "force" use of another device (cause windows is stupid). But computers are pretty stupid, they only do what you (or others) tell them to do. And they come with soo many audio devices now, modems, webcams, motherboards, video cards, bluetooth, ... It's probably just trying to use the default sound output, which is obviously your webcam (it has no output, well, most of them anyway).
I'm hoping to avoid a reinstall. I'm on a boat with limited resources, and I've got a lot of data on the disk. But, I think I have a working Linux HD that I can install to see if that works. And this is a new purchase, so I've got the Windows disk that I can put back in to see if I've messed up the bios trying to get the thing to boot something besides Windows. (I can't believe the bios has the option for a windows os check on bootup!) So, I'll see if I can find that old Linux boot disk first. Hopefully it's still on the boat and not in storage. But, the sound worked just fine when I swapped in my Linux disks. Things get confusing when you're organizing stuff after a move to a new system, but I could swear that the sound died when I did an update/upgrade.
I'm a bit confused about your comment that my default sound output is my webcam. Was this a funny, or did you see something in the data I listed that points to a webcam that I don't have?
Last edited by Quakeboy02; 06-06-2019 at 10:53 AM.
It was a funny. We used to only have one soundcard (most of us anyway). Now we have at least 3 on most systems. Motherboard, Videocard, Webcam, ... Whatever one powers up first gets index 0 (default), and the webcam being the simpler one, tends to win a few times. Various ways to force indexing, even have a dummy soundcard (snd-aloop) to route audio to taste regardless of what hardware / sound daemon is in play.
Whether this one is needed or not, I don't know yet. But there was some sort of i915 error and the proverbial "some site" recommended doing this. I've got it bookmarked in case anyone just has to see it.
So, I guess the next step is getting a new HDMI cable and trying that. Also, I wonder if "model=basic" might be shutting off the HDMI now that the rest of it is working? So, I guess I'll try *that* next.
I've had an HDMI cable fail. Radio Shack brand and a while ago. Things were "much" better with a new cable. Although I haven't done much HDMI audio to date. I just know that it's not a default by default. Even though that might be a modern expectation.
Well, it was working. And then it didn't. I've looked through the BIOS and I can make it stop working altogether, but I can't make it work any better than it is right now, which is halfway. I've got the headphones enabled, more or less by accident, following instructions for fields I don't understand and can't find a current list of setting for. Maybe I'll run into something.
And I just put a new HDMI cable on and that didn't change anything. I can't even figure out how to boot with the old kernel. I thought it was just holding shift down during boot, but that doesn't get me to the grub screen.
Do you remember the fields names? ADC (analog to digital converter, normally for audio input / microphones). DAC (digital to analog converter, for speakers / output). MIC for microphone. PCM (pulse code modulation) for output / speakers. And a few for codecs / protocols for things like optical or digital audio like S/PDIF (sony/philips digital interface), or TOSLINK.
I've made some progress today. I have headphone sound. Plugging it in switches the sound sink. Unplugging it changes the sink back to the HDMI, which still has no sound. (grrrr)
My current /etc/modprobe.d/snd_hda_intel.conf (renamed from whatever I had it as for clarity). I commented everything except for "model=generic". That's what made the biggest improvement, as in the HDMI and headphones are now available and headphones switches the sink.
So, this seems to be telling me something, but I don't understand what. It looks like the hp has linei_outs and mic in active state but nothing else, and the line has dig-out and nothing else. The "line" is new. I think I need to fiddle with the other modprobe values a bit more to see what happens.
Is there a way to restart pulse to reload the modprobe values, or do I have to continue to reboot? Sorry, me<-clueless.
Put "autospawn = no" in /etc/pulse/client.conf and you can stop/start pulseaudio.
$ pulseaudio --kill
$ pulseaudio --start
$ sudo modinfo snd-hda-intel
Code:
filename: /lib/modules/4.9.0-9-amd64/kernel/sound/pci/hda/snd-hda-intel.ko
description: Intel HDA driver
license: GPL
alias: pci:v00001022d*sv*sd*bc04sc03i00*
...
alias: pci:v00008086d00001C20sv*sd*bc*sc*i*
depends: snd-hda-core,snd-hda-codec,snd-pcm,snd
retpoline: Y
intree: Y
vermagic: 4.9.0-9-amd64 SMP mod_unload modversions
parm: index:Index value for Intel HD audio interface. (array of int)
parm: id:ID string for Intel HD audio interface. (array of charp)
parm: enable:Enable Intel HD audio interface. (array of bool)
parm: model:Use the given board model. (array of charp)
parm: position_fix:DMA pointer read method.(-1 = system default, 0 = auto, 1 = LPIB, 2 = POSBUF, 3 = VIACOMBO, 4 = COMBO). (array of int)
parm: bdl_pos_adj:BDL position adjustment offset. (array of int)
parm: probe_mask:Bitmask to probe codecs (default = -1). (array of int)
parm: probe_only:Only probing and no codec initialization. (array of int)
parm: jackpoll_ms:Ms between polling for jack events (default = 0, using unsol events only) (array of int)
parm: single_cmd:Use single command to communicate with codecs (for debugging only). (bool)
parm: enable_msi:Enable Message Signaled Interrupt (MSI) (bint)
parm: patch:Patch file for Intel HD audio interface. (array of charp)
parm: beep_mode:Select HDA Beep registration mode (0=off, 1=on) (default=1). (array of bool)
parm: power_save:Automatic power-saving timeout (in second, 0 = disable). (xint)
parm: pm_blacklist:Enable power-management blacklist (bool)
parm: power_save_controller:Reset controller in power save mode. (bool)
parm: align_buffer_size:Force buffer and period sizes to be multiple of 128 bytes. (bint)
parm: snoop:Enable/disable snooping (bint)
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