Sound Problems in fully updated 8.04

[Nigel Henry]

On Monday 29 September 2008 04:18, Roger Benham wrote:
> Sound Problems in fully updated 8.04
>
> I have recently installed in an ancient (2001?) computer put together with
> more modern memory, hard drives, DVD-RW's a copy of WXP on one side and
> U-8.04 on the other. Both boot up fine, both play movies but the Ubuntu
> side has no sound. I went into Add/Remove and installed the items I found
> under all available applications for Sound Driver, Sound Card and Codec but
> still no joy. Yet in WXP on Real Player I have sound and picture. Any
> suggestions as to what I could do next?
> Thanks, Roger.

Hi Roger. Win XP plays sounds, so there is no problem with the soundcard. As 
it's an older machine, I would expect the soundcard to be supported with 
linux, so would you post a bit of info for us. The output from the following 
commands, as user, which are listed below.

lspci -v    (just the part for the soundcard)
cat /proc/asound/cards
lsmod | grep snd

If you have anything plugged into the usb which may be sound related, 
(webcams, usb midi keyboards, etc.) remove them, as the usb starts early in 
the boot process, and sometimes these devices can interfere with the actual 
soundcard being set as card0. the usb devices can be sorted out later.

Often times the sound is deliberately muted so that you don't damage your 
ears, or speakers, so open alsamixer as user on the CLI (terminal/Konsole), 
and see if anything is muted, or sliders down at zero. The "M" key toggles 
the mute/unmute.

Something else that comes to mind as I have Kubuntu 8.04 installed is that 
pulseaudio may be entering the equation, and causing problems with the sound.

Kubuntu 8.04 doesn't have pulseaudio installed as default, but I believe that 
Ubuntu does. You can easily disable it by doing an apt-get remove 
alsa-plugins-pulseaudio. You can always re-install it later, if you want to 
use it, but temporarily removing it at least takes it out of the equation if 
you have problems getting the sound working.

Something else to check is /etc/group, and make sure that your user name is 
there for the "audio", and "cdrom" groups. I havn't had a problem with that 
with Kubuntu, and only on some early Debian versions did I have to 
specifically add my user name to those groups, but it's worth checking.

That's all I can think of for now. Please post back the info I requested.

Nigel.