[SLL] Fedora 8 - getting sound to work?

[Steve McCarthy]

JK, appreciate the pointers.

Just to follow up, it appears that maybe the sound was working all along.  I
went into alsamixer and set the volume level to 100% for all the devices,
and then I was able to get sound to come out.  By process of elimination, I
figured out the key device that controls the master volume was "surround"
and not the expected "master" or "line" or "pcm."  (I am pretty certain that
my old el-cheapo ES card does not have any surround-sound capability.)

So for my sound card, it appears that alsa is not detecting the devices
properly.  I think that it wants to properly identify the pcm device on the
sound card and use it, but it seems to be mis-identifying it, assigning pcm
to something else, and assigning the surround device to the hardware port
where pcm data is.  Does that make any sense?  Is there any way to change
those mappings around via configuration?

I'm guessing that's why individual applications like xmms, Firefox, and
others are not able to control the volume - moving the volume control from
100 to 0 to 100 has no effect - and I have to resort to pavucontrol, the
PulseAudio volume control application, as a master switch.

-Steve M.

On Jan 10, 2008 4:58 AM, Jesse Keating <jkeating at j2solutions.net> wrote:

> On Wed, 9 Jan 2008 20:51:09 -0800
> "Steve McCarthy" <sjm at mccrew.com> wrote:
>
> > Anyone else on the list using Fedora 8 who has figured out how to get
> > sound to work?
> >
> > I am upgrading after several years of relative happiness with FC4,
> > where the sound worked reasonably well.  After the upgrade, the sound
> > does not work at all on the same hardware.
> >
> > I have spent some time Googling, and have tried some of the more
> > obvious things like checking the permissions of
> > the /dev/(mixer|audio|dsp) and /dev/snd/*.  There have been some
> > problems reported with the new pulseaudio, and I have removed all
> > packages that reference pulseaudio, to no avail.
>
>
> Upgrades are somewhat dicey especially when bringing in a new sound
> system.
>
> I would suggest a 'yum groupinstall "Sound and Video"' to pick up the
> missing pieces, and to get pulse back on the system.  Also make sure
> that ConsoleKit is installed and running, and that PolicyKit is
> installed as well.
>
> ConsoleKit determines who has the local console and doles out ACLs on
> the devices according to PolicyKit.  If you're not getting the ACLs you
> likely won't be able to access the device and that will cause
> pulseaudio to have some headache.
>
> --
> Jesse Keating RHCE      (jkeating.livejournal.com)
> Fedora Project          (fedoraproject.org/wiki/JesseKeating)
> GPG Public Key          (geek.j2solutions.net/jkeating.j2solutions.pub)
>



-- 
Steve McCarthy
   sjm at mccrew.com
   mccrew at gmail.com