I did it again - I broke sound on my system

LucaSpiller

When I first started using Gentoo about 3 months ago I got everything working nicely, sound worked fine - until I ran KDE for the first time it is. After that it just gave up, no matter what I did no matter what I tried it just would not work.

Over half-term I decided to start a new Gentoo installation, something more optimised and hopefully to get sound working. I tried the Stage 1 over Stage 3 method and it all worked fine (except udev, but devfs will do). I decided to give a nitro kernel a shot to hopefully get that little bit more out of my system. I then followed the ALSA guide on the wiki and it worked.

I couldn't really live with just a terminal so I emerged kde. I was a bit nervous at first because this is what broke it before, but this time all seemed fine. I managed to get everything working nicely and had no problems at all. I didn't really like the basic KDE theme and options so I copied all of my old config files over for KDE (just ~/ stuff) and then it happened again. Sound just gave up. I have tried everything, it won't even work as root without KDE (or even X) running so it must have caused some sort of system wide change, but how? Doesn't KDE just run with the users privelidges?

Any ideas because I don't really want to reinstall the whole system again.

If this is of any use, whenever I change the sound options in KDE I get a message saying that knotify has crashed, and running cat /dev/dsp or /dev/sound/dsp outputs a load of '~'.
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theDreamer · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 20 Oct 2003 Posts: 118

supply information about your machine hardware and linux information (versions).
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LucaSpiller · Posted: Fri Feb 25, 2005 5:39 pm Post subject:

Well I don't really know how that will help because it is definately a configuration problem, but here you are anyway:

Athlon XP 2600+
512mb DDR memory
PC Chips M848A Rev. 2.1 - Onboard Sis 7012 chipset (intel8x0 kernel module)

Install from Gentoo 2003.3 Stage 1 over 3 - used a stage 3 tarball over existing installation
Linux 2.6.11-rc4-nitro1 "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?"

XenoTerraCide · Veteran Joined: 18 Jan 2004 Posts: 1418 Location: MI, USA

I'm gonna say this. your problem was in one of those configuration files you copied over. You might be able to post them and someone can tell you where the problem is. Its also possible deleting them then emerging kde again will work (it may not). I don't know what the problem is or how to fix it but PC troubleshooting process tells me look at the last thing changed before problem occur, and that's what you said you did so it's in one of those files somewhere.
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aethyr · Veteran Joined: 06 Apr 2003 Posts: 1085 Location: NYC

Try this:

Reboot your machine directly to the console (do not allow it to go into kdm/gdm/xdm or whatever).

Check your sound levels with alsamixer (make sure no channels are muted).

Try doing something like "cat /dev/ramdom > /dev/dsp" (make sure you turn down the volume on your speakers, it's pretty harsh). Instead, you could try using a command-line player like mpg123 to play an mp3.

If that works, then your sound is OK and it's just KDE futzing with it.

[edit] Check out these potentially helpful posts!
https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-p-2127098.html#2127098
https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-p-2129256.html#2129256 <-- especially this one by jago25_98

Ideas for fixing it if that is the case: KDE could be changing volume levels, muting channels, switching your sound server (i.e. arts problems), etc... I don't use KDE, so I'm not sure what the problem could be, but that would be how I'd go about troubleshooting it.

However, for an easy fix, if the sound works before you start KDE, and worked before you copied your configuration files over, I'd try removing all the KDE config files (~/.kde*, I don't know if there are others), and logging into KDE again.

If that doesn't work, then it's possible permissions on your sound devices got changed. For comparison, here's what mine look like:

LucaSpiller · Posted: Wed Mar 02, 2005 10:40 pm Post subject:

I have been busy with coursework, and XP removing Grub didn't help so I haven't been able to try any of the suggestions until now. Thanks, but unfortunately they didn't help me.

When I ran "cat /dev/ramdom > /dev/dsp" I got nothing from my speakers. I even ran "cat /dev/dsp" at the same time, but just got ~'s again. "cat /dev/random" on its own doesn't really produce much so I tried catting a load of other things to "/dev/dsp" and "/dev/sound/dsp", but got the same results.

The permissions seemed slightly screwed up, so I tried changing them but it wouldn't change.