Karmic: occasional no sound at boot up

[Mark Greenwood]

On Saturday 13 Mar 2010 18:20:34 Mark Fraser wrote:
> On Saturday 13 Mar 2010 17:28:08 Mark Greenwood wrote:
> > On Saturday 13 Mar 2010 17:11:41 Mark Greenwood wrote:
> > > On Friday 26 Feb 2010 23:26:18 lanzen wrote:
> > > > On Wednesday 24 February 2010 19:49:34 Jonas Norlander wrote:
> > > > > On 23 February 2010 17:03, Mark Fraser
> > > > > <ubuntu at mfraz.orangehome.co.uk>
> > > >
> > > > wrote:
> > > > > > Occasionally when I turn my computer on, I will get a pop up
> > > > > > appearthere saying that it couldn't find any sound drivers.
> > > > > > Shutting down and then rebooting gets the sound back, but it is
> > > > > > getting annoying!
> > > > >
> > > > > I used to have this problem to. The cause was that some package had a
> > > > > wrong dependency and pulled in pulsaudio, purging pulsaudio and some
> > > > > other packages solved it. This was on Jaunty, in Karmic I haven't had
> > > > > this problem.
> > > >
> > > > Karmic here and I see this happening from time to time on both my eeepc
> > > > and the desktop PC. I did all I knew I could to get rid of pulsaudio
> > > > that still shows up in the audio setting window. I cannot remove it. It
> > > > doesn't show as default and I don't know what it does there. libpulse0
> > > > is in and, as Mark said, it looks like it doesn't like being touched.
> > > > Startup sound plays.
> > > >
> > > > On reboot I always get the audio back.
> > >
> > > I'll add a 'me too' to this one. However for me even a reboot has stopped
> > > curing it. I now have no sound in KDE, but skype and mplayer etc all
> > > still work.
> > >
> > > I also have a USB sound card. If that is connected to the computer on
> > > boot up, KDE doesn't find it. If I connect it after booting up, KDE finds
> > > it and I can use it. So I suspect this problem is some kind of
> > > initialisation thing where KDE is searching for the sound card before it
> > > is 'ready'.
> > >
> > > Mark
> > 
> > Hmm, just out of interest, the people having this issue haven't recently
> >  installed anything from the nVIDIA VDPAU PPA have they? I notice that
> >  includes a load of xine packages, and I started having these problems
> >  around the time I upgraded from that PPA.
> 
> No, I haven't added the nVidia PPA repository, but I did have the Kubuntu 
> backports PPA enabled for a while until they put KDE4.4 in there.
> 

You might be interested to try this, it *seems* to have worked for me (so far, I'm not counting my chickens yet though).

This only applies if you have Intel HD audio or compatible, but:

in /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf
find
options snd-hda-intel power_save=10 power_save_controller=N
and change it to
options snd-hda-intel power_save=10

Mark