can't get any audio in XFCE

newbiesforever · 01-04-2015, 04:10 PM

For at least a month I have been unable to get any audio. When I try to play music in gnome-mplayer, the music just plays silently; but when I run the audio mixer, it starts but displays this message:

Code:

GStreamer was unable to detect any sound devices. Some sound system specific GStreamer packages may be missing. It may also be a permissions problem.

Now I don't think there's anything actually wrong with the audio or anything missing; I think there's a problem with XFCE, the desktop I'm using. Because I booted into Icewm, and there, the audio played perfectly.

I had another problem with XFCE not long ago: http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...ay-4175526401/ . I was told that was due to some of the big distros (apparently including XFCE) now using an authentication keyring; it was probably preventing me user account from shutting the system down or suspending. (As with the audio, I can shut down in Icewm.) Well, I have no idea what the point of that is, but if it's also responsible for my audio not working in XFCE, then unless someone can tell me how to bypass it or give me access to everything (my source in that post didn't), I'm going to dump XFCE and find another desktop.

It was suggested that I edit sudoers to give myself more access, so I did. The changed part of my sudoers file now says:

Code:

root	ALL=(ALL:ALL) ALL
josh	ALL=(ALL:ALL) ALL

That's the only change I know how to make in sudoers. But it doesn't help: I still have both of the above problems.

sudowtf · 01-07-2015, 10:21 AM

i dont know if this will help, but hupefully it will. I'm running Debian and XFCE. this is my "installed" list which includes the keywords audio,sound,pulse,alsa: -- some may pertain to you and some may be ignored.

Code:

$ aptitude search audio sound pulse alsa | grep ^i
i A alsa-base                       - dummy package to ease purging of obsolete 
i A alsa-utils                      - Utilities for configuring and using ALSA  
i A gstreamer0.10-alsa              - GStreamer plugin for ALSA                 
i A gstreamer1.0-pulseaudio         - GStreamer plugin for PulseAudio           
i A libasound2                      - shared library for ALSA applications      
i   libasound2:i386                 - shared library for ALSA applications      
i A libasound2-data                 - Configuration files and profiles for ALSA 
i   libasound2-dev                  - shared library for ALSA applications -- de
i A libasound2-plugins              - ALSA library additional plugins           
i A libaudio2                       - Network Audio System - shared libraries   
i A libcdaudio1                     - library for controlling a CD-ROM when play
i A libpulse0                       - PulseAudio client libraries               
i A libpulsedsp                     - PulseAudio OSS pre-load library           
i A libsoundtouch0                  - Sound stretching library                  
i A libwebrtc-audio-processing-0    - AudioProcessing module from the WebRTC pro
i   pulseaudio                      - PulseAudio sound server                   
i A pulseaudio-module-x11           - X11 module for PulseAudio sound server    
i A pulseaudio-utils                - Command line tools for the PulseAudio soun

I would assume your issue is not XFCE related, but "xfce4-mixer" would be the audio/volume utility to use.