Sound troubleshooting documentation

[David Henningsson]

On 02/06/2012 03:48 PM, Tom Davies wrote:
> 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.

But, those 17 (!) steps do not provide what we need. What we need for 
initial bug triaging (or answering questions), is alsa-info, 
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Audio/AlsaInfo and in case of PulseAudio related 
stuff, a PulseAudio log according to https://wiki.ubuntu.com/PulseAudio/Log
Or even simpler, you can just run the "ubuntu-bug audio" command, and it 
will attach all the relevant information to the bug report.

> 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?

I disagree: this makes the assumption that the user has a problem with 
his speakers. And on most laptops, you don't even have a speaker jack.

We have problems with internal mics, headphones, external mics, internal 
speakers, crackling sound, random applications, HDMI, and a lot of other 
things; speakers connected through a line-out jack is not even one of 
the most common bug reports.

> 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.

Yeah, that's the way I feel about
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SoundTroubleshootingGuide
that contain some useful stuff and some nice screenshots.

> On the other hand we really do need to delete a ton of stuff
> to bring the wiki up-to-date.

If so,
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SoundTroubleshootingProcedure
is the first to remove.

> 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.

Maybe? I don't know and would like to hear more opinions about this.

Anyway, the problem I always have is that I never say thanks for all the 
pages that are correct and informative, only complain about the pages 
that are broken :-) So thanks to the doc team for all the maintenance!


>
> 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 <http://launchpad.net/%7Ediwic>
>
>     [1] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Audio/AlsaInfo and
>     https://wiki.ubuntu.com/PulseAudio/Log
>
>     -- ubuntu-doc mailing list
>     ubuntu-doc at lists.ubuntu.com </mc/compose?to=ubuntu-doc at lists.ubuntu.com>
>     https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-doc
>



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