Sound troubleshooting documentation

[Tom Davies]

Hi :)
This guide is meant to help people gather the info required to post a good question on Launchpad or for posting a bug-report
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SoundTroubleshootingProcedure
It is well maintained and kept up-to-date.  

If it needs a little re-arranging of the steps in order for smoother flow then it's probably a good idea to communicate with the main person that keeps updating the page.  I don't think he is subscribed here as his main interest is in helping individuals solve their problems.  

I think any trouble-shooting steps should really start with 
1.  Are the speakers plugged in and switched on.  Many need their own separate power-supply and have their own on/off button or dial on the front.  
2.  Is the little data-lead plugged into the tiny light-green hole?  [a nice photo of a generic plate with a big green arrow pointing at the right hole]
3.  Have other speakers been tried or the same speakers tried on a different system?

In my experience those 3 things have solved about 90% of sound problems.  People often start with complicated things without checking the basics.  

The problem i always have about deleting pages is that information and effort might be lost without the good stuff being transferrred to the new pages.  On the other hand we really do need to delete a ton of stuff to bring the wiki up-to-date.  

How using redirects?  If this page
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SoundTroubleshooting
was redirected to one of the other pages then people could still look at the history of the page and get at the work they put in to move it somewhere better.  

Regards from
Tom :)


--- On Mon, 6/2/12, David Henningsson <david.henningsson at canonical.com> wrote:

From: David Henningsson <david.henningsson at canonical.com>
Subject: Sound troubleshooting documentation
To: ubuntu-doc at lists.ubuntu.com
Cc: "Ubuntu Audio Developers" <ubuntu-audio-dev at lists.launchpad.net>
Date: Monday, 6 February, 2012, 13:11

Hi ubuntu-doc team (ubuntu-audio-dev cc:ed),

There are several guides for sound troubleshooting on help.ubuntu.com:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SoundTroubleshooting
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SoundTroubleshootingGuide
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SoundTroubleshootingProcedure

In addition to the more official documentation at

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DebuggingSoundProblems

...which I recently made up-to-date.

In short, we don't need four pages. In addition, I'm worried about the quality:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SoundTroubleshootingGuide

This seems to be the best of the three, even if a few things needs fixing. It also has some nice screenshots, and some of this could actually be copy-pasted into the official documentation.

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SoundTroubleshooting

This one seems less maintained than the other two, and is a little of a mixed bag of correct information, outdated information, and things that can break your system. It is also a mixup of generic instructions and machine specific workarounds, which I'd prefer to keep separate if possible.

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SoundTroubleshootingProcedure

This one contains random steps and terminal commands to execute, with very little information about what command is to aid what problem. And for information collection, we have better scripts/instructions to do that, both in the wiki [1] and through apport.

Especially for the last page, I'd prefer to remove it altogether, but I also realise that someone has put a lot of effort in writing and maintaining that information. I don't want to step on anyone's toes, but of course I don't want people to break their systems either.

What do you suggest? How can we improve the quality of the sound troubleshooting documentation?

-- David Henningsson, Canonical Ltd.
http://launchpad.net/~diwic

[1] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Audio/AlsaInfo and https://wiki.ubuntu.com/PulseAudio/Log

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