Intrepid Sound Fixes

[Karl Larsen]

    If you have sound when you first turned on your Intrepid but then 
after one or more re-boots your sound failed, this will fix that 
problem. It was sent to me by Nigel Henry in France. Nigel fixed two 
problems with Intrepid so this message has Part 1 and Part 2.

    Part 1 covers the method to get back sound on your Intrepid. Part2 
covers fixing init so it no longer sets the alsamixer.


Part 1:

    There is a device you can work with called the AlsaMixer which these 
days you can reach by opening a terminal window. In this type alsamixer. 
If you see just one adjustment then pulse audio is on and working.

    Now turn off AlsaMixer and do this by pressing the esc key. Now 
bring it back up using this: alsamixer -D hw:0 which will show all your 
AlsaMixer settings. For example my laptop has 7 adjustments but the 
critical one is called PCM and it was, for some reason set at zero. This 
was why my sound quit. I set it back to 90 and now my sound is again 
normal.

    Turn off the AlsaMixer with esc and your done. Good reading is the 
man pages for AlsaMixer.

Part 2:

    I and others observed that turning off the Intrepid was not clean 
and might be why the alsamixer was changing. Here is what Nigel said:

This reply in particular was interesting.

<quote>

 J wrote on 2008-10-19: (permalink)

The trick works inserting "ifconfig wlan0 down" (or the active network
interface in use) at the begining of the stop) section
of /etc/init.d/alsa-utils.
I'm sure it's not network-manager related, my laptop also hangs 
uninstalling
the package and starting wifi via wicd.
Btw, if your alsa-mixer is always mute at system start, and does not 
remember
the last settings, the trick also fixes it.
<end quote>

I've already tested what was suggested above, and my 5sec delay for Alsa on
reboot is reduced to as good as nothing.

OK. Now to edit the /etc/init.d/alsa-utils shellscript.

Open a terminal, then sudo gedit, and navigate to /etc/init.d/alsa-utils.

So far so good. Go to "Edit" > "Preferences" in Gedit, and check the box 
under "Line Numbers, which says "Display line numbers". Close the 
window. Now click on the "Search" menu on Gedit, and then on "Go to 
line". Enter in the box 353, and you should end up with the cursor on 
line 353, which should read stop).

Use the right arrow to scroll along to the end of stop), then click 
enter. Do a few spaces which will take you to the start of the next lines

Now I don't know if you have a wired, or a wireless connection, but you 
will
need to add one of the following 2 lines to the /etc/init.d/alsa-utils
script.
ifconfig eth0 down
ifconfig wlan0 down

This is how it should look after adding one of the 2 lines above.

  stop)
        ifconfig eth0 down
 EXITSTATUS=0
 TARGET_CARD="$2"
 case "$TARGET_CARD" in
   ""|all) TARGET_CARD=all ; log_action_begin_msg "Shutting down ALSA" ;;

Save the changes, exit the editor, and reboot.

Now when rebooted your Alsamixer settings should now be how you left them
before rebooting. "Hopefully".

All the best.

Nigel.

    I have turned my laptop Intrepid off and on many times and my sound 
has been perfect.

Karl

-- 

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