No sound on amarok after upgrade

[AndersBrontosaurus]

upgraded to Kubuntu 9.04 this afternoon and since then I can't play music. Get some message from phonon saying that something about my soundchip (which is built in on the motherboard)isn't working properly and therefore kubuntu is going back to pulseaudio. Could anybody tell me what is happening? I also had problems watching movies on both VLC and dragon but suddenly, without doing any changes they work again.

Oh...and by the way.. where did the networkmanager go? I know I read somewhere that i had to install it manually but haven't seen it again...If you happen to know where please tell me.

...and for some reason cpu is up at 50% all the time. Even without programs running.

Thanks in advance
Anders

[abalone]

Re: No sound on amarok after upgrade

Oh...and by the way.. where did the networkmanager go? I know I read somewhere that i had to install it manually but haven't seen it again...If you happen to know where please tell me.

There's a "Network Management" widget that you can add to the panel.

CPU usage problem sounds like the "kded4 running amok." thread (and it's happened to me too).

[AndersBrontosaurus]

Re: No sound on amarok after upgrade

thanks. found the applet. Don't understand how to switch on/off though. It seems to autoconnect and that's it. I'll check the amokthread What about the sound?

[abalone]

Re: No sound on amarok after upgrade

No idea about the sound problems, sorry. Actually, I've always uninstalled pulseaudio on every distro I've encountered it. I don't seem to need it for anything.

I've not yet dared to try wireless with KDE 4 (or to mess with my routers), and wasn't using the network manager at all.

Just tried to play with it and plasma/panel/something crashed and came back. (And again just now.) Now it's not showing the two extra wired networks I set up, just the automatic one. (It just crashed again.) So, uh. I don't know. What happened to using ifup/ifdown anyway?

Edit: Ah, the new connections had somehow "broken off" and were floating in their own black, plasmoid boxes on the desktop. X-ed those and they're back "integrated", if superimposed over the VPN category...

...now they're gone again. I don't even know how to tell which connection is active. It should be "New Wired Connection".

Edit: And it keeps crashing -- like when I click "OK" on the Settings or Manage Connections dialogs.

Well, knetworkmanager still exists, too.

[flarson]

Re: No sound on amarok after upgrade

ifupdown still works as long as you get rid of network-manager. There is also a GUI tool called wicd which is great for wireless. It works well.
sudo aptitude install wicd
will get it for you.

[abalone]

Re: No sound on amarok after upgrade

ifupdown still works as long as you get rid of network-manager.

If it's really either/or, can I use NetworkManager (I assume you mean the daemon, not some panel applet?) from the command line to connect/disconnect to/from (whatever)? man networkmanager or NetworkManager --help didn't seem to think so but I'm not sure.

[abalone]

Re: No sound on amarok after upgrade

thanks. found the applet. Don't understand how to switch on/off though. It seems to autoconnect and that's it. I'll check the amokthread What about the sound?

Does this seem familiar? It's a month old though.
http://forum.kde.org/phonon-blocks-o....html#pid55730

[flarson]

Re: No sound on amarok after upgrade

In network-manager the applet and the non-applet are quite connected, especially for wireless. The non-applet part will start a wired network at boot, but will not start a wireless interface until it finds an applet. That in my opinion is the best reason not to use it.

It is not really either or. ifupdown is used to configure lo so you do not want to uninstall it.
/etc/NetworkManager/nm-system-settings.conf contains a setting to tell network-manager to not manage an interface that is listed in /etc/network/interfaces. This defaults to true, but somehow network manager seems to manage them anyway and cause confusion.

I don't think you can use network-manager to bring an interface down. If you down it with
sudo ifconfig eth0 down
network-manager will try to bring it back up.

I am becoming more and more convinced that network-manager is of no use to me what so ever. For ethernet connections they can be configure very easily and reliably with ifupdown and do not need to have daemons running in the background, using up resources and confusing my process tree. For wireless connections, at home I want it to come up before I login so I can ssh to the machine and network-manager just will not do that. Especially with the flakiness of the KDE applet, wicd is just a much better solution. It gives me good reliable control of my network, and makes wireless easy.

[abalone]

Re: No sound on amarok after upgrade

Looks like a great response, mando_hacker. Thank you! I'll try to make sense of it once I'm fully alert again... I remember having some problems with a manually configured eth0 vs. network manager...

...

Now, about the sound problems: Maybe ALSA's mixing doesn't "just work" in your case so it's blocked and KDE/Phonon/whatever falls through to pulseaudio (see System Settings->Multimedia for the alternatives and their order, and mouse over them for slightly more info).

Below is a link to a similar thread. It quotes an .asoundrc file that defines a dmix plugin that might help with the ALSA sound mixing. If you use it, I suppose you should make sure plain old ALSA-using applications output sound to the now dmix-equipped "default" defined in the .asoundrc, not to "hw:0" or "hw:1" or what have you. But then, I'm not sure you can do that to Phonon. Or if it's necessary. Or what sort of ALSA interfaces "x-phonon:" or "plughw:" are. Or why JACK isn't listed as an "Output Device Preference" like it is in Wikipedia's Phonon screenshot whereas Pulsaudio is (it's not even installed). (Actually, I barely know what I'm talking about.)

Anyway, give it a try: -> http://forum.kde.org/phonon-blocks-o....html#pid55730

[AndersBrontosaurus]

Re: No sound on amarok after upgrade

@Abalone:
Thanks! It seems like you're completely correct. However, back from a week without computers, I'm still a lamer. I get this message everytime I start the computer: "The playbackunit for sound Intel ICH5 with ALC650F (Intel ICH5) is not working. Going back to PulseAudio" ( Well, this is not exactly what it says, I've tried to convert it from swedish).

...So Should I remove that PulseAudio then, or what?

Better check your link again. Don't really really get it.

[AndersBrontosaurus]

Re: No sound on amarok after upgrade

...and suddenly everything works. Haven't touched anything.

Clean install, here I come. Speaking about that. What is actually best? Mounting internal ntfs partitions as mnt or media?

[abalone]

Re: No sound on amarok after upgrade

/media seems to be meant for removable media, not internal harddisks. But you can mount your NTFS partitions wherever in the filesystem you most need their contents, right? Whether that's in /mnt or somewhere under /opt or /home... it's up to you. (Personally, I've replaced the original /media directory with a softlink to /mnt... I figured I'd rather have everything in one place.)

[AndersBrontosaurus]

Re: No sound on amarok after upgrade

well I have everything in media so i might just leave it like that then. Not sure what a softlink is.
Thanks for your help.

And ooh... the soundproblem seems most of the time to be that kmix sopmetime set soundvolume to 0 at startup.

Anders

[abalone]

Re: No sound on amarok after upgrade

There's a "restore volume on login" option in Kmix' settings, on the off chance that you didn't know already...

[AndersBrontosaurus]

Re: No sound on amarok after upgrade

Abalone, you are hereby appointed to be my personal assistant in any matter I may come across.
Linuxlearning comes slow. Thanks for help!

Anders