After upgrading from Gutsy to Heron, laptop blares noise from speakers

[lhgreene]

Upgraded to Hardy Heron on a System76 laptop that came with Ubuntu preinstalled and Kubuntu added afterward, that was successfully running Gutsy Gibbon, with multiple user accounts that were able to use KDE and Gnome under Gutsy.

After the upgrade to HH, GRUB runs and it gets to the login window successfully. All users can successfully login to Gnome sessions. Most users also can login to KDE sessions. But for one user (and only that one) when logging into a KDE session - the computer speakers blare loud continuous noise that does not stop. Only happens for that one user, and only in KDE. The same user can login to a Gnome session without encountering the noise, and other users can login to KDE sessions without the noise.

For peace and sanity of all in the proximity of the machine, am able to use the speaker icon and mute the sound. But that's not a solution to the problem. Need to determine what's causing the noise, and find a way to stop it, so audio can be used normally on the machine by that user.

Any suggestions?

[lykwydchykyn]

Re: After upgrading from Gutsy to Heron, laptop blares noise from speakers

I could speculate about why it would do this, but it's hard to say for sure. Have you tried creating a fresh user account for this user, and just copying over needed documents? It's likely something crazy in the user's dotfiles.

Or you could try playing with the kmix settings. Possibly something got turned on or off there. Try deleting the kmix settings files:
rm ~/.kde/share/config/kmix*
Then log out and back in.

[lhgreene]

RESOLVED: After upgrading from Gutsy to Heron, laptop blares noise from speakers

Thanks. Turned out that it WAS the Mixer settings. Someway somehow, the front mic was turned on and all the way up, and just pumping feedback out of the speakers. Muted the front mic, and the noise stopped. Everything else seems to be running okay. Just a little weirdness to make life interesting when doing kubuntu upgrades, I guess.

I could speculate about why it would do this, but it's hard to say for sure. Have you tried creating a fresh user account for this user, and just copying over needed documents? It's likely something crazy in the user's dotfiles.

Or you could try playing with the kmix settings. Possibly something got turned on or off there. Try deleting the kmix settings files:
rm ~/.kde/share/config/kmix*
Then log out and back in.