No system or flash sound in 8.04

[Ole Juul]

I have just updated from Dapper to Hardy and now there is no system sound and YouTube has no sound either. Interestingly, it is possible for me to play some online radio stations - but not all.

My old Hardy installation was using USB sound, but I changed to using the onboard Intel sound before I did the online upgrade. After trying everything that I could find on the net, there was no improvement. I then disabled the onboard and installed an SB-Live card. The situation is exactly the same, except for additional entries in Alsamixer - notably PCM. I plan to continue with the SB card.

Here is part of "aplay -l":

card 0: Live [SB Live 5.1], device 3: emu10k1 [Multichannel Playback]
 Subdevices: 1/1
 Subdevice #0: subdevice #0

I have purged and re-installed "linux-sound-base alsa-base alsa-utils" several times. Nothing changes. After two days of concentrating on this, I would really like a hint or two from someone who understands this.

[kevinc]

Re: No system or flash sound in 8.04

It's been a while since I've used Hardy. I have a vague idea that by opening the speaker icon in the task bar and then selecting "mixer" that another window opens. Here there are two volume controls: Master and PCM.

I can't remember which one solves the problem, but try moving the sliders on either one or both and try the sound. I think that this will solve the problem. On my notebook the mute, volume up and down buttons were linked to PCM, but the master was off. Once it was put up, everything worked perfectly. It could have been the other way round. HTH.

[Ole Juul]

Re: No system or flash sound in 8.04

Thank you kevinc for answering. Yes, I had that problem in Dapper. It is the PCM volume which defaults to off after a reboot. This is not the problem here but is the reason that I changed to a PCI card. That gave me a PCM setting but did not help. I normally use alsamixer but Kmix is the same. I have sound, just not from the system (like at bootup) or some things like YouTube. Most of the time, both Firefox and Epiphany crash when the system is asked to do two sound sources.

I think there is something fundamentally wrong with the software which has nothing to do with my settings. I have found other things which don't work (such as user management) and now realize that the upgrade from Dapper to Hardy is faulty. I don't know if there is any fix for that. I haven't seen anything in my searches.

[Telengard]

Re: No system or flash sound in 8.04

I suggest backing up your data and doing a clean install of Hardy 8.04.3. I always clean install, just to avoid any possible problems associated with upgrading.

[Ole Juul]

Re: No system or flash sound in 8.04

Yes, a clean install sounds like good advice. I was hoping to avoid that because there were some KDE features which I would be unhappy about losing but in the end I will accept some compromise if I have to. Still, it is looking like I have to go back to Dapper if I want full functionality.

To test the theory, I did a clean install of Kubuntu 8.04 on another machine where I don't have any data. It had similar problems - only part of the sound system works. For the purpose of testing, I have now installed Ubuntu 8.04 on that machine and the "out of the box" situation is worse so far. I will try yet another machine later, but it is looking like Hardy has a serious problem with sound which an amateur like myself cannot fix.

[Telengard]

Re: No system or flash sound in 8.04

I will try yet another machine later, but it is looking like Hardy has a serious problem with sound which an amateur like myself cannot fix.

Hardy has no serious problems with sound, for me at least. Your comments make me wonder what kind of obscure hardware you must have if it isn't properly supported in current versions of Kubuntu. I can't understand why you'd want to stay all the way back with Dapper, when Hardy works so well for so many.

At any rate I doubt I'm capable of fixing your sound problems, so hopefully some of the heavy hitters in this forum will notice your pleas for assistance. Good luck.

[Ole Juul]

Re: No system or flash sound in 8.04

Thanks Telengard, I appreciate you taking the time to answer.
I just mentioned going back to Dapper because that was working quite well. Perhaps after a fresh install on my main machine, I too will be as satisfied as others.

Regarding hardware: the machine I am concerned with here is an Intel D915 board with an Intel P4 2.8GHz 511. There is 3GB ram and the HDD is a Seagate 300GB SATA. I have disabled the onboard Intel/Realtek sound in the bios and added a Sound Blaster Live card because the onboard did not appear to be fully supported. I must admit that I was using a Creative USB Extigy with Hardy before the upgrade which could have caused a difference in performance between Dapper and Hardy. Anyway, I think that is pretty standard hardware and has shown good Linux compatibility in the past. The second computer which I put together for testing here is an Asus P4s333-M with an Intel P4 1.6GHz 478. Yes, quite old, and I could only rustle up an 8.4 GB drive and 512MB ram for the test. The sound is the Creative Extigy. It seems to run other apps just fine - just not all sound. I've run Dapper on less resources, and with good speed and functionality.

Anyway, I think this is the end of this thread and I should clean up my main machine and do a clean install. There is probably too much old config cruft. After that, I can repost with more focus. (If there are any problems.)

[dibl]

Re: No system or flash sound in 8.04

One cheap & easy thing you could do is to make a 9.04 Live CD, and boot it, to see how well your sound card is supported. You may have to twiddle with sound modules -- here's the classic troubleshooting guide:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=205449

[Ole Juul]

Re: No system or flash sound in 8.04

Thanks dibl, I didn't think of testing the functionality with a live disk. I'll try that. I had just relied on compatibility lists. Also, that troubleshooting guide is indeed a very good one.

In the meanwhile I managed to get the test machine (P4-1.6GB, 512ram, SB-extigy) to work with Kubunty 8.04. As mentioned in previous posts, I had tried a desktop install of both Kubunty and Ubuntu 8.04 - without properly functioning audio. Flash and system sound works, as does alsamixer and PCM. The things which I learned could be of use to others so I will post the procedure here.

I decided to try a base (server) install, and then add the desktop after - that did the trick. Well almost. The things listed below were needed too. Strangely, these procedures didn't work with the regular installs. This machine now supports audio properly. I am aware that it is likely not the way that most people want to go. There are however some things here which might very well allow someone to get various parts of their sound system going if they are having problems.

Download the Hardy Heron server edition and burn the iso. This installs fast and leaves you with a very functional base system. There is no need to choose any servers.

Now add the Kubuntu desktop like this:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install kubuntu-desktop

Reboot and you will have your shiny new KDE GUI.
Now go to System Settings> Sound System> Hardware> Select the audio device
Choose Advanced Linux Sound Architecture (alsa)

Now open a terminal and type:

asoundconf list

This lists the names of available sound cards. Note the name of the card you want and insert it into following command:

asoundconf set-default-card name

In my other clean installs alsamixer would not start and exited with "alsamixer: function snd_ctl_open failed for default: No such device" and setting the default card using asoundconf seems to solve that. I have noticed that many people post on forums with that problem and don't get answers.

I was now be able to open alsamixer by typing:

alsamixer

Make the changes that are needed (or preferred). In my case it was the master and pcm which had to be unmuted. (Do this by typing "m".)

Now save those settings so they will survive a reboot:

sudo alsactl store

To get some streaming radio stations and Youtube I now installed the following:

flashplugin-nonfree
libflash-mozplugin

This can be done at the command line or in the GUI. I prefer the Adept Manager.

So far that gave me the radio stations that I wanted as well as Youtube sound in Konqueror, but no video on Youtube.

So I installed Epihany which promptly complained about no dbus and refused to load. Looking at the installed dbus files, I guessed that the missing one might be dbus-x11 and I proceded to install that.

W00t!
That worked! Now everything works in Epiphany, but Konquerer refuses to do either video OR sound on Youtube. Oh well, this post is not about video. I'll look into that another time. This installation was just for experimental purposes anyway. I wanted to prove (to myself) that Hardy could do basic sound playback on this machine. I also wanted to try an alternate (for me) installation method.

Note that there were reboots between some of these steps - YMMV.

I have no Idea why a normal desktop install did not configure itself correctly on this system which is obviously capable of running current Linux properly. Hopefully a clean install on the faster system which I originally was trying to configure will respond to some of the same tricks if the normal install doesn't work out of the box.