Intrepid Sound Problems

[Karl Larsen]

Daniel T Chen wrote:
> On 11/14/2008 03:43 PM, Karl Larsen wrote:
>   
>>      I did a search today to try and get sound back on my new Intrepid. I
>> see this is a MAJOR problem and there are 25 web pages full of
>> mis-information.
>>
>>      First, the sound was perfect yesterday. Turned off the laptop and
>> this morning when it booted up the little speaker's had a red X over
>> them. I cleared that by right clicking and setting it right. No idea how
>> it got changed.
>>
>>      I tried the w32codecs which was worthless, turned of PulseAudio
>> worthless, and began to wonder what is going on.
>>
>>      I did get some drivers for Firefox to view U-Tube things and tried
>> to install a special driver that apt-get could not find which was
>> supposed to fix the sound problem. I will continue to Google but will
>> avoid all bug reports because they are VERY confusing.
>>
>> Karl
>>
>>     
> I empathize; audio on Linux is a difficult problem space in general.
>
> That said, to effectively troubleshoot, please provide as much debugging 
> information to the bug triagers as possible.  There is a nice script to 
> gather this information for you and upload it to a pastebin.  Please see 
> the http://www.alsa-project.org/alsa-info.sh script referenced from 
> https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DebuggingSoundProblems.
>
> Another course of action is to open an answers.launchpad.net question.  
> Be sure to attach the alsa-info.sh output.
>
> Now, to un-muddy the problem space a bit.  Firstly, w{32,64}codecs isn't 
> going to affect your sound driver.  If your speaker icon in GNOME's 
> notification area has a red 'X' over it, it's not a codec problem but 
> one of infrastructure.  Normally this boils down to two possibilities in 
> recent Ubuntu releases (hardy and intrepid), namely either ALSA or 
> PulseAudio is the culprit.  (In non-trivial circumstances, both ALSA and 
> PulseAudio are to blame.)  Secondly, libflashsupport is obsolete in 
> intrepid, so it's forcibly removed during a full upgrade process.
>
> Perhaps a diagram for Ubuntu 8.10 will help.  We'll start at the top of 
> the audio stack (where applications like your speaker icon reside).
>
> -----------------------
> Applications
> -----------------------
> PulseAudio
> -----------------------
> ALSA userspace library
> -----------------------
> ALSA kernel driver
> -----------------------
> Sound hardware
> -----------------------
>
> One of the many problems with the "look online and attempt to use what's 
> documented in twenty-five scattershot wikis, blogs, forum posts" 
> approach is that you get a lot of misinformation (as you stated blithely 
> earlier).  Quality debugging involves systematically and individually 
> inspecting each of the five layers diagrammed above.  It's utter madness 
> to try the buckshot approach.
>
> The w{32,64}codecs bit is the applications layer.  Your issue needs to 
> be debugged from the bottom of the stack upward.  I recommend not even 
> bothering with further application tweaking until you've eliminated the 
> middle two ALSA layers as problems.
>
> A few of us hang out in #alsa and #ubuntu-audio-help on irc.freenode.net 
> if that's preferable.
>
>   
    Hello, I have been told correctly that the sound does pass through 
the kernel so there might be a problem with the new Intrepid kernel. 
First I would like to change the kernel and see if that cures the sound 
problem.

    What is the best way to load     Ubuntu 8.04.1, kernel 
2.6.24-21-generic onto my Intrepid laptop?

Karl


   

-- 

	Karl F. Larsen, AKA K5DI
	Linux User
	#450462   http://counter.li.org.
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