[SOLVED] Choosing a sound driver

Dylanus · n00b Joined: 02 Jun 2018 Posts: 40

Hi all,
I have Gentoo installed running KDE, and I have no sound. When I play a video online there is no sound, and there is no sound widget on the panel. I checked my kernel configuration and I realised I have ALSA enabled, but I did not compile any drivers. The output of lspci for audio is

Logicien · Posted: Wed Aug 01, 2018 2:47 am Post subject:

Hello,

from the root tree of Menuconfig go to Device Drivers/Sound card support/Advanced Linux Sound Architecture/HD-Audio/ Select HD Audio PCI and the codec for your sound card. If in doubt about the codec select all of them. You will be able to keep only the usefull one later as Linux will load it automatically.

Put everything you can in modules about sound.
_________________
Paul

Dylanus · n00b Joined: 02 Jun 2018 Posts: 40

Thanks. I've done that now. I ran make && make modules_install, but lsmod doesn't show any sound drivers, even after a reboot. Why aren't they showing up? Did I miss a step?

Logicien · Posted: Wed Aug 01, 2018 8:03 am Post subject:

It depend if you compile the sound support in modules or directly in the kernel image. In the second case there is no module to load. You must install alsa-utils if not and see with alsamixer and

Dylanus · n00b Joined: 02 Jun 2018 Posts: 40

So the output of aplay -l is

Logicien · Posted: Wed Aug 01, 2018 10:40 am Post subject:

What does output

Dylanus · n00b Joined: 02 Jun 2018 Posts: 40

Turns out the modules are there. I loaded each one with modprobe. I still don't have sound when I play a video. I'm using KDE and the panel does not have a speaker widget for some reason. So I'm not sure whether I have no sound because the volume is at zero, or because the sound module is not working. Do you know how to get the speaker widget to show up in KDE so I can check this? All the documentation assumes that it will be there.

Logicien · Posted: Wed Aug 01, 2018 11:24 am Post subject:

What does output

Dylanus · n00b Joined: 02 Jun 2018 Posts: 40

lsmod | grep snd:

Jaglover · Posted: Wed Aug 01, 2018 12:31 pm Post subject:

PulseAudio is a layer between ALSA and sound applications, it won't work if ALSA does not work.
Is this a laptop? I read laptops require sometimes options passed to the sound module.
Did the sound work from installation media? If yes, check out what modules were needed.
_________________
My Gentoo installation notes.
Please learn how to denote units correctly!

Dylanus · n00b Joined: 02 Jun 2018 Posts: 40

I installed Pulseaudio, but I'm not really sure what to do with it. I've come from Arch, and everything was taken care of without me noticing.
I just rebooted the system, and none of the sound modules are loaded. The system does automatically load a lot of required hardware modules. Does that mean it's not recognising any of the modules as related to the sound card I have?
This is a laptop. I don't know anything about options I could pass.
When I run pulseaudio as a command all on it's own, this is the output I get:

Logicien · Posted: Wed Aug 01, 2018 1:29 pm Post subject:

If everything work with Arch without passing any parameter to snd-hda-intel, we can suppose that you don't need to do it with Gentoo. Pulseaudio is intended to be use by a normal user not root and Pulseaudio is started automatically with the graphical session of a user because it is a graphical sound server.

The fact that the sound modules are not loaded with the system at boot time may be because something is wrong with the kernel version the modules. If you have kernel stuff in a boot partition and other kernel stuff in the /boot directory of the root partition this can be the cause of a mismatch where you are using an earlier version and/or configuration of the kernel than the modules compiled.

If you have a boot partition this one must always be mounted in the /boot directory at anytime something is read and write in.

Mainly you must be sure that the module snd-hda-intel is loaded and than the good codec after. Your output show only codecs loaded not snd-hda-intel who is the main module to be loaded for your sound card, unless it have been compiled in hard in the kernel image. Give the ouput of

Dylanus · n00b Joined: 02 Jun 2018 Posts: 40

It's working! I checked the kernel configuration and realised that the snd-hda-intel module was actually built-in. I recompiled the kernel with that as a module and booted from that, and sound is now working. Thanks very much for your help.
I still don't have a convenient way of adjusting the volume and I can't see a widget in the KDE menu for that. Do any of you know of a way to do that?

Logicien · Posted: Wed Aug 01, 2018 3:00 pm Post subject:

You can open a graphical terminal and type alsamixer. You have for sure a mixer for Kde in the Portage tree. But understand that if Pulseaudio is started with the Kde session it is Pulseaudio who manage the sound card and you are better to use Pavucontrol to manage the sound. Maybe you have a Kde frontend for Pavucontrol that you can emerge.
_________________
Paul

Dylanus · n00b Joined: 02 Jun 2018 Posts: 40

I'll give that a go tomorrow. Thanks.

Dylanus · n00b Joined: 02 Jun 2018 Posts: 40

Alsamixer works fine, thanks. I uninstalled Pulseaudio and it still works fine, so I think having the HD module installed as builtin was the problem. Everything's working well now. Thanks for your help.