No sound with Ogg Vorbis or CDs in new Slack 11.0 installation
 

I've installed Slack 11.0 with the default 2.4.33.3 kernel. I ran alsamixer and unmuted everything. When I try to play an Ogg Vorbis file, there's no output at all. The same thing happens when I try to play an audio CD. I reinstalled the libvorbis, libogg and libtheora packages, just to see if it would help. Unfortunately, that did nothing. The only sound I can hear is console bleeping :/. I'm not getting any error messages - ogg123 plays the file and KsCD plays CDs, just there's no sound. Hmm, it doesn't seem limited to Ogg Vorbis or CDs - I'm having the same problem with WMAs (and probably MP3s as well, but I haven't got any to test).

In case it matters, here's the lspci for my sound device:

00:1f.5 Multimedia audio controller: Intel Corporation 82801DB/DBL/DBM (ICH4/ICH4-L/ICH4-M) AC'97 Audio Controller (rev 03)

It's in a Toshiba Satellite Pro A10 laptop.

I didn't have any problems with 10.2 :/.

Any ideas?

Thanks :).

It seems to be OK if I turn off the "Headphone Jack Sense" item in AlsaMixer. I'm currently in runlevel 3 when I was in the shell, I ran AlsaMixer and disabled the aforementioned item.. sound then worked. I ran "alsactl store" just to be sure. When I ran startx, it seemed I had to run AlsaMixer and go through that whole process. Odd :/. At least I have sound now :D.

Hmm, on further inspection, it appears there is still a problem. If I reboot my machine, then I have to run AlsaMixer again and turn off the "Headphone Jack Sense" setting. Why isn't it permanent?

I'd bet storing of alsa mixer settings is permanent (in /etc/asound.state) but probably is not restored at system startup by /etc/rc.d/rc.alsa because ALSA kernel modules are not yet loaded or they miss in /etc/modprobe.conf. Similar record like may do the job. See rc.alsa startup script for more.

Thanks for the suggestion, dunric. I'll try that later on :).

Also, to store alsa settings, issue "alsactl store" after changing them.

I know, I did that (see post #2) :).

Oops - missed that one :)

Unfortunately, this did nothing to help :(. I can't see anything useful in rc.alsa :/.

Edit: Yes, it looks like it's ok in /etc/asound.state:


Any other suggestions?

I'm sorry it didn't helped to you.
Concerning rc.alsa it parses modules configuration if Alsa modules are not yet loaded and loads them by sound-card pattern.
Only after that is possible to set mixer settings.

I'd try to store settings by alsactl store then make some changes and call alsactl restore and check if it did restored previous values. If alsactl restore works I'd focus on timely module loading so it'll also work at system startup.

EDIT: Heh, I've now noticed you are using 2.4 kernel so alias for sound-card-0 should be placed in /etc/modules.conf instead.

Running "alsactl restore" seems to work.

Also, the alias is already in /etc/modules.conf:

alias char-major-116 snd
alias char-major-14 soundcore
alias sound-service-0-0 snd-mixer-oss
alias sound-service-0-1 snd-seq-oss
alias sound-service-0-3 snd-pcm-oss
alias sound-service-0-8 snd-seq-oss
alias sound-service-0-12 snd-pcm-oss
alias snd-card-0 snd-intel8x0
alias sound-slot-0 snd-intel8x0

I don't know what's changed between 10.2 and 11.0 to cause this (perhaps the kernel version itself?) :/.

Edit:

I did a kind of test. I decided to put the "/usr/sbin/alsactl restore" line before the "echo "Loading ALSA mixer settings:..."" line in the load_alsa_mixer() function. This worked fine if my default runlevel was 3, but when I changed it back to 4 I still have the problem. It seems to be X causing the problem, because if I do a "startx" from runlevel 3, then the problem comes back.

Edit: Maybe not X itself, but KDE. I don't know where to look though.

Grr.

Anyone? If I could get hints about where to look in X or KDE, that'd be great. I don't understand why X or KDE should cause this problem, though.

Try using KMix to set the volume settings, KDE stores it's own mixer settings by default.

I wish I'd thought of that! Thank you, that did the trick :). KMix seems to modify my /etc/asound.state, rather than just reading from it so turning off the headphone thing in there worked. Should I tell Pat about this, or it it just me that's having this problem?

Thanks again to everyone who tried to help (even XP :)).