Fix: No sound Fedora 10

[russellr]

Hi,

This took me hours to fix and none of the threads I found anywhere solved it.

I tried this thread on this forum, but no joy there either.

The confusion I had was with this new PulseAudio vs ALSA stuff, which I only slightly understand.

Everything was set to PulseAudio, volume controls up, etc. etc., but no sound.

The solution was to set the ALSA mixer volume controls up!

Steps (in GNOME):

1. Open Volume Control (System->Preferences->Hardware->Volume control)
2. Select ALSA Mixer
3. Unmute everything (except maybe microphone)
4. Raise volume sliders for everything

Then select System->Preferences->Hardware->Sound, and click Test on "Sound playback" (which should probably be set to Autodetect).

I hope that helps someone!

cheers,
RR

[scottro]

I'm sure that it will (help someone. possibly many someones) and thank you for posting.

[russellr]

Hi again.

An update....

After a reboot, the sound disappears again.

If you check the volume sliders for Alsa Mixer and Pulse, they look fine.

The secret is to move them a little and the sound will re-appear!

Hope that helps.

regards,
RR

[DoctorJLowe]

First off, thanks for taking another whack at this. Like you, i have tried Silpheed2K's wonderfully detailed how-to; PulseAudio just isn't cooperating. When i tried to set the ALSA mixer volume, i made an interesting discovery: it isn't there. At least, Gnome doesn't think it's there. That's despite that i have the following packages installed:

alsa-lib-1.0.19-1.fc10
alsa-lib-devel-1.0.19-1.fc10
alsa-plugins-pulseaudio-1.0.18-2.fc10
alsa-utils-1.0.19-1.fc10

My only options in the Volume Control module are "Playback: Null Output (PulseAudio Mixer)" and "Capture: Monitor of Null Output (PulseAudio Mixer)". The sliders are all the way up. What do i need to get the ALSA mixer to show up in the Gnome volume controls?

I can do this:

paplay /usr/share/sounds/generic.wav

It produces no errors, but no sounds, either. Yet this same hardware works fine in OSX, and did so with Ubuntu's Feisty Fawn. How do i get the 'null output' to become real output?

Details: this is an Apple G4 PowerBook. I don't have the soundcard info handy, but will post that after i boot back into OSX and view the system profile. Or maybe i'll boot off the Ubuntu Live CD and look at what it's using for audio.

[russellr]

Hi,

Sorry, I have no suggestions apart from ensuring you've installed the entire Group "Sound and Multimedia" (or whatever it is called).

All I can say is what I found works for me.

Clearly there are problems in this area with F10.

regards,
RR

[DeCSS]

Thank you. This has been driving me crazy!

[terry_g]

Strangely when I open Volume Control Alsa is no longer listed yet sound works.
Alsa disappeared from the list after the last kernel update to kernel-2.6.27.12-170.2.5.fc10.i686. I still have two earlier kernels installed but when I try to boot them I get a black screen with a small rectangle for the cursor. Something to do with the Nvidia drivers and kmod that was installed with the latest kernel. I had no sound with the previous kernel-2.6.27.9-159.fc10.i686 but I was still able to use kernel-2.6.27.7-134.fc10.i686 which had intermittent sound problems.
I wonder what the next update will bring.

[oldcpu]

Originally Posted by terry_g

I had no sound with the previous kernel-2.6.27.9-159.fc10.i686 but I was still able to use kernel-2.6.27.7-134.fc10.i686 which had intermittent sound problems.

I find if I custom compile alsa, it will be built for a specific kernel version, and often an update to the kernel can break the functionality of the alsa sound driver that I custom compiled (against an older kernel).

I do not have much fedora experience, but I have found with other distributions, that if one installs specially packaged updated alsa versions (that were not included with the originally packaged Linux distribution's version) they often tend to be kernel version specific, and a kernel update may break the new alsa version functionality.

Hence when updating one's kernel, one needs to be aware that an alsa rebuild may be necessary.

If one sets up grub to dual boot between different kernel versions, then it is not uncommon that one kernel version boot will have sound, and the other kernel version boot will not have sound.

[LawrenceB]

I am having exactly the same problems with Fedora 10. The problem seems to be NVIDIA Alsa mixer...this thing seems to have a mind of its own. Sometimes it appears as a device in the volume control sometimes not. Even stranger is that sometimes only null devices appear there. I have found that un-installing the GUI mixer for ALSA sound devices then re-installing can fix the problem...however even if you get sound working great it is still prone to failure. Simply re-booting can screw it all up again. I too am now suffering from a bad case of pulse audio. OpenSUSE 11 Audio is flawless.

[terry_g]

I did a complete reinstall of Fedora 10 i386 to partitions on another hard drive and then updated, leaving my previous install intact. The new install is a lot better about one out of ten boot-ups sound will not work, a reboot fixes it. Occasionally bug buddy reports that Metacity has crashed right after loading the desktop, log out and back in and it works again.

Terry

[norm.h]

Maybe something in this thread will help.
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...t=sound+device
norm