bizarre sound (gstreamer/alsa) problem with mandriva 2007.0
 

Hello all..

Recently I upgraded from Mandriva 2006 to Mandriva 2007.0. Since then, I have had problems with the sound:

- after booting, the sound icon in the gnome panel has a red cross on it, and when trying to open the alsa mixer, the following error message appears: "no volume control gstreamer plugins/devices found"
However, harddrake tells me that the sound card was detected, and according to the bootup sequence the sound modules are loaded. All settings in the sound-preferences-menu are on ALSA and gstreamer is installed.

Now, this is where it gets rather weird - I have found a way to get the sound working by doing the following:
- open harddrake, change the sound driver from "ATI IXP AC97 controller(snd-atiixp [ALSA])" to "OSS [unknown]". Then I undo this step, thus choose the original driver (snd-atiixp) from the list.

Suddenly I can open the alsamixer and the sound is working again (even though the panel icon still has the little cross).

However, when I reboot, the same problem with the sound is back again. All rather baffling..


I have a Toshiba Satellite A60 laptop, a Mandriva 2007.0 distribution (2.6.17-5mdv) with Gnome, an ATI soundcard (driver snd-atiixp).

I am a very new newbie to Linux, hopefully I have been accurate enough in my descriptions and not forgotten anything you must know. I'd be very grateful for any suggestions or help with this!

This is the lspci output:

00:00.0 Host bridge: ATI Technologies Inc R200 AGP Bridge [Mobility Radeon 7000 IGP] (rev 05)
00:01.0 PCI bridge: ATI Technologies Inc PCI Bridge [IGP 340M]
00:13.0 USB Controller: ATI Technologies Inc OHCI USB Controller #1 (rev 01)
00:13.1 USB Controller: ATI Technologies Inc OHCI USB Controller #2 (rev 01)
00:13.2 USB Controller: ATI Technologies Inc EHCI USB Controller (rev 01)
00:14.0 SMBus: ATI Technologies Inc ATI SMBus (rev 18)
00:14.1 IDE interface: ATI Technologies Inc ATI Dual Channel Bus Master PCI IDE Controller
00:14.3 ISA bridge: ATI Technologies Inc Unknown device 434c
00:14.4 PCI bridge: ATI Technologies Inc Unknown device 4342
00:14.5 Multimedia audio controller: ATI Technologies Inc IXP150 AC'97 Audio Controller
00:14.6 Modem: ATI Technologies Inc IXP AC'97 Modem (rev 01)
01:05.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc Radeon Mobility 7000 IGP
02:06.0 CardBus bridge: Texas Instruments PCI1410 PC card Cardbus Controller (rev 02)
02:07.0 Ethernet controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL-8139/8139C/8139C+ (rev 10)
02:0a.0 FireWire (IEEE 1394): Texas Instruments TSB43AB21 IEEE-1394a-2000 Controller (PHY/Link)

Try a newer release of alsa. You can download tarballs from alsa-project.org. Alternatively, if you want to maintain your rpm management in Mandriva (I have been using Mandriva since 8.2), I have a complete build environment that will rebuild the rpms. You can download it from here.

Beyond that, I can't really help as I don't know the AC'97 code (I work on the HDA code).

Tobin

thanks a lot, i'll give that a try!

I too have been having the same problem but on FC6 with an old SoundBlaster Value sound card. I haven't found anything that fixes it yet. Strange thing is after a random number of resets sometimes it works, until the next reset. When I go to "Audio configuration"/Soundcard detection, it detects the soundcard vender as Creative, Model as Labs SB Live! EMU10k1 and Module snd-emu10k1, but the PCM Device is empty. When the sound is working the PCM device is listed (don't remember what its listed as though). I'll try the above and see if that helps.

EDIT:
I tried the same thing that irkku did(the work around to get the sound to work), in my case changing the default audio card from the Creative labs one to PNPb006, applying that, reloading the audio drivers (from the system tab in audio settings) after a few seconds it says there was an error and that I'd have to reset to reload the drivers. Then I changed back to the creative lab drivers, did the reload again, with the same error message again, but sound works. I'm pretty sure I have the latest ALSA drivers, but I could be easily mistaken.

# chkconfig --level 2345 sound off
# chkconfig --level 2345 alsasound off

check that /etc/modprobe.conf contains

remove unknown /sbin/modprobe --first-time -r --ignore-remove unknown
install unknown /sbin/modprobe --first-time --ignore-install unknown
remove snd-atiixp /sbin/modprobe -r snd-pcm-oss; /sbin/modprobe --first-time -r --ignore-remove snd-atiixp
install snd-atiixp /sbin/modprobe --first-time --ignore-install snd-atiixp && { /sbin/modprobe snd-pcm-oss; /bin/true; }

/etc/modprobe.d/sound contains

alias snd-card-0 snd-atiixp
alias sound-slot-0 snd-atiixp

and /etc/hotplug/blacklist contains

snd-atiixp
snd-atiixp-modem


# reboot