[arch-general] GDM and/or PulseAudio mute my sound
Working from the command line in a text-only console using espeakup, all is well, and sound works as it should. However, starting GDM mutes my sound card. If I go back to the text console and run sudo systemctl start alsa-restore Again, all is well in the text console until I login with GDM. I am expecting to hear Orca speaking at this point, but I hear nothing. In order to get Orca to speak, I must run gnome-terminal from within GNOME and then do sudo systemctl start alsa-restore again. Once I do this, I have sound until I shutdown the computer. I have tried xdm and lxdm also, and while they themselves don't cause me to lose sound at the text console, I am for some reason unable to login and use GNOME from either of these display managers. I also tried commenting out load-module module-device-restore in /etc/pulse/default.pa, as was a possible work-around in a much older version of PulseAudio that mentioned /etc/pa.conf, which I translated to /etc/pulse/default.pa since there is no /etc/pa.conf, but this also doesn't solve my problem. I should note that although I am using systemd commands to restore sound, this problem is not related to systemd, as I was experiencing the same issue before I migrated to full systemd yesterday. I am currently running Arch on a USB flash drive connected to a Dell Optiplex from about 2003 or 2004, but I can't find the exact model, as lshw is only giving me Dell Computer Corporation as the vendor name with no model number, and it doesn't even say Optiplex anywhere, although I remember reading it somewhere a couple of years ago. The computer was given to my family several years ago, but it's basically been a spare box until recently when my newer and better designed box passed away due to human error. This is why I unfortunately don't have the full information about this machine. The sound card is listed by lspci as 00:1f.5 Multimedia audio controller: Intel Corporation 82801DB/DBL/DBM (ICH4/ICH4-L/ICH4-M) AC'97 Audio Controller (rev 01) and uses the snd_intel8x0 kernel module. I am currently running linux-lts 3.0.40-1, pulseaudio 2.1-1, pulseaudio-alsa 2-1, alsa-utils 1.0.25-3 and gdm 3.4.1-2. I would appreciate any help anyone can provide, and will be happy to answer any questions I may have missed here. ~Kyle
On Thu, Aug 16, 2012 at 9:28 PM, Kyle
Working from the command line in a text-only console using espeakup, all is well, and sound works as it should. However, starting GDM mutes my sound card. If I go back to the text console and run
sudo systemctl start alsa-restore
Again, all is well in the text console until I login with GDM. I am expecting to hear Orca speaking at this point, but I hear nothing. In order to get Orca to speak, I must run gnome-terminal from within GNOME and then do
sudo systemctl start alsa-restore
again. Once I do this, I have sound until I shutdown the computer. I have tried xdm and lxdm also, and while they themselves don't cause me to lose sound at the text console, I am for some reason unable to login and use GNOME from either of these display managers. I also tried commenting out
load-module module-device-restore
in /etc/pulse/default.pa, as was a possible work-around in a much older version of PulseAudio that mentioned /etc/pa.conf, which I translated to /etc/pulse/default.pa since there is no /etc/pa.conf, but this also doesn't solve my problem. I should note that although I am using systemd commands to restore sound, this problem is not related to systemd, as I was experiencing the same issue before I migrated to full systemd yesterday.
I am currently running Arch on a USB flash drive connected to a Dell Optiplex from about 2003 or 2004, but I can't find the exact model, as lshw is only giving me Dell Computer Corporation as the vendor name with no model number, and it doesn't even say Optiplex anywhere, although I remember reading it somewhere a couple of years ago. The computer was given to my family several years ago, but it's basically been a spare box until recently when my newer and better designed box passed away due to human error. This is why I unfortunately don't have the full information about this machine. The sound card is listed by lspci as
00:1f.5 Multimedia audio controller: Intel Corporation 82801DB/DBL/DBM (ICH4/ICH4-L/ICH4-M) AC'97 Audio Controller (rev 01)
and uses the snd_intel8x0 kernel module. I am currently running linux-lts 3.0.40-1, pulseaudio 2.1-1, pulseaudio-alsa 2-1, alsa-utils 1.0.25-3 and gdm 3.4.1-2. I would appreciate any help anyone can provide, and will be happy to answer any questions I may have missed here. ~Kyle
Have you tried running "alsamixer -D hw" and see if there are any muted channels in your hardware? Also, once I had a similar problem and solved it by simply deleting the files at ~/.pulse/*.tdb HTH -- Rodrigo
According to Rodrigo Rivas:
Have you tried running "alsamixer -D hw" and see if there are any muted channels in your hardware?
Master is at 87% normally. Once GDM runs, it zeros out and mutes. Also, once pulseaudio starts, the Master channel zeros out and mutes. Also, once I had a similar problem and solved it by simply deleting the files at ~/.pulse/*.tdb Unfortunately this is also not working. I even tried deleting the entire ~/.pulse directory with no luck. Thanks for the help. ~Kyle
On Fri, Aug 17, 2012 at 12:46 AM, Kyle
According to Rodrigo Rivas:
Have you tried running "alsamixer -D hw" and see if there are any muted
channels in your hardware?
Master is at 87% normally. Once GDM runs, it zeros out and mutes. Also, once pulseaudio starts, the Master channel zeros out and mutes.
Also, once I had a similar problem and solved it by simply deleting the files at ~/.pulse/*.tdb
Unfortunately this is also not working. I even tried deleting the entire ~/.pulse directory with no luck. Thanks for the help. ~Kyle
One last idea. Maybe the gnome-settings-daemon is playing dumb with your sound. I think you can disable the sound plugin of g-s-d using dconf (org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.sound.active). I don't know if that will affect also to the GDM greeter, but it is worth trying it. As a last resort you could also try renaming "/usr/lib/gnome-settings-daemon-3.0/libsound.so" and see what happens. -- Rodrigo
According to Rodrigo Rivas:
One last idea. Maybe the gnome-settings-daemon is playing dumb with your sound. I think you can disable the sound plugin of g-s-d using dconf (org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.sound.active).
I tried dconf write org/gnome/settings-daemon/plugins/sound/active false
I don't know if that will affect also to the GDM greeter, but it is worth trying it. It had no effect, either in the greeter or in GNOME itself.
As a last resort you could also try renaming "/usr/lib/gnome-settings-daemon-3.0/libsound.so" and see what happens.
Strangely, this also has no effect at all. Once GDM starts, the master volume is still zeroed out and muted. I say zeroed out and muted because I must run alsamixer, turn up the master volume and then unmute it in order to get the sound working again, although sudo systemctl start alsa-restore also does work, since the volume was previously saved using sudo systemctl start alsa-store while the volume was at the proper level. At this point, I am totally stumped. The computer I had that died used a SoundBlaster Live Value, and although the sound started out muted, restoring the alsa volumes always worked as expected. However, on this machine with the Intel onboard sound, nothing seems to keep the volumes from muting whenever GNOMe and GDM start. ~Kyle
On Sat, Aug 18, 2012 at 4:20 AM, Kyle
According to Rodrigo Rivas:
One last idea. Maybe the gnome-settings-daemon is playing dumb with your sound. I think you can disable the sound plugin of g-s-d using dconf (org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.sound.active).
I tried
dconf write org/gnome/settings-daemon/plugins/sound/active false
I don't know if that will affect also to the GDM greeter, but it is worth trying it.
It had no effect, either in the greeter or in GNOME itself.
As a last resort you could also try renaming "/usr/lib/gnome-settings-daemon-3.0/libsound.so" and see what happens.
Strangely, this also has no effect at all. Once GDM starts, the master volume is still zeroed out and muted. I say zeroed out and muted because I must run alsamixer, turn up the master volume and then unmute it in order to get the sound working again, although
sudo systemctl start alsa-restore
also does work, since the volume was previously saved using
sudo systemctl start alsa-store
while the volume was at the proper level. At this point, I am totally stumped. The computer I had that died used a SoundBlaster Live Value, and although the sound started out muted, restoring the alsa volumes always worked as expected. However, on this machine with the Intel onboard sound, nothing seems to keep the volumes from muting whenever GNOMe and GDM start. ~Kyle
Did you also do "systemctl enable alsa-store"? "enable" means it should be set to "start" on boot. Immediately after you have booted try "systemctl status alsa-store" - it should show it as running. If not then try the "enable" command above. -- mike c
On Sat, Aug 18, 2012 at 8:45 AM, mike cloaked
while the volume was at the proper level. At this point, I am totally stumped. The computer I had that died used a SoundBlaster Live Value, and although the sound started out muted, restoring the alsa volumes always worked as expected. However, on this machine with the Intel onboard sound, nothing seems to keep the volumes from muting whenever GNOMe and GDM start. ~Kyle
Did you also do "systemctl enable alsa-store"? "enable" means it should be set to "start" on boot.
Immediately after you have booted try "systemctl status alsa-store" - it should show it as running. If not then try the "enable" command above.
Actually thinking about it whilst the "systemctl start alsa-store" command should work to start the service if it is not running after boot, you will likely need "systemctl enable alsa-store.service" to start it at boot as the short form only works for starting and stopping the service at present. -- mike c
Finally able to return my attention to this problem. alsa-store.service and alsa-restore.service are oneshot services with no [Install] section. Therefore, they cannot be enabled and disabled using systemctl. They do, however, appear to run as needed, probably as a dependency when udev loads the modules for the sound device. I find that the volumes are always saved at shutdown and restored at boot time, but something in gdm or gnome-settings-daemon, or possibly even Pulse itself is muting the volume, although it seems unlikely that Pulse is doing it, because if I restore the master volume after gdm starts, either using alsamixer or by explicitly running alsa-restore.service, logging into GNOME once again mutes the master volume and sets it to 0. Apparently, Google is not my friend this time, as I can find no information about this problem, and I appear to be the only one experiencing it, and only on this machine. Additionally, I resized the existing partition on this machine's hard disk and installed Arch into the free space, just in case something was behaving strangely because Arch was installed to a thumb drive, but the problem persists. Any help with this unusual problem is greatly appreciated. ~Kyle
According to Kyle:
Apparently, Google is not my friend this time, as I can find no information about this problem, and I appear to be the only one experiencing it, and only on this machine.
Correction: I actually did find [1], and that appears to be my exact problem, but it is also unsolved. Please help. Thanks. [1] https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=130201 ~Kyle
According to Kyle:
Apparently, Google is not my friend this time, as I can find no information about this problem, and I appear to be the only one experiencing it, and only on this machine.
Correction: I actually did find [1], and that appears to be my exact problem, but it is also unsolved. Please help. Thanks.
Hi Kyle, I think I have also been having the same problems with pulseaudio on Arch. Basically pulseaudio seems to mute and zero the master channel on my sound card (its a VirtualBox machine) whenever it starts. I asked for help on the pulseaudio mailinglist back in June [1], but nothing much came out of it. I then gave up for a bit, but have been meaning to raise a bug on it. So this weekend I did so [2,3]. [1] http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/pulseaudio-discuss/2012-June/013710.ht... [2] https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/31469 [3] https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=54673 Cheers, Frank
I had similar issues on my machine. First I launched mixer and set everything the way I wanted, then I ran sudo alsactl store. Now the problem is gone. Chester On 09/08/2012 09:59 AM, Frank Wilson wrote:
According to Kyle:
Apparently, Google is not my friend this time, as I can find no information about this problem, and I appear to be the only one experiencing it, and only on this machine.
Correction: I actually did find [1], and that appears to be my exact problem, but it is also unsolved. Please help. Thanks.
Hi Kyle,
I think I have also been having the same problems with pulseaudio on Arch. Basically pulseaudio seems to mute and zero the master channel on my sound card (its a VirtualBox machine) whenever it starts.
I asked for help on the pulseaudio mailinglist back in June [1], but nothing much came out of it.
I then gave up for a bit, but have been meaning to raise a bug on it.
So this weekend I did so [2,3].
[1] http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/pulseaudio-discuss/2012-June/013710.ht... [2] https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/31469 [3] https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=54673
Cheers,
Frank
You are not the only one experiencing this problem. This isn't even unique to archlinux either. Wherever pulseaudio is installed, it brings with it chaos and destruction. When I do any install of Linux, if the sound card isn't working it's impossible since I'm totally blind and if the Linux don't talk the Linux don't walk. You can imagine the "fun" the linux accessibility community is having with this issue. Searching archived messages on orca-list@gnome.org quite a few messages have been written. The most recent couple provide a howto for debian systems to get an accessible install of a g.u.i. system and be able to handle pulseaudio successfully. There are of course the ~/.pulse/ directory trees that can be disposed of if pulse isn't going to be used on systems and a pulse-gtk-dummy package I think archlinux has that can be installed to run interference with gnome on pulseaudio too. No idea what that will do to or for your system though. On Sat, 8 Sep 2012, Chester Wisniewski wrote:
I had similar issues on my machine. First I launched mixer and set everything the way I wanted, then I ran sudo alsactl store. Now the problem is gone.
Chester
On 09/08/2012 09:59 AM, Frank Wilson wrote:
According to Kyle:
Apparently, Google is not my friend this time, as I can find no information about this problem, and I appear to be the only one experiencing it, and only on this machine.
Correction: I actually did find [1], and that appears to be my exact problem, but it is also unsolved. Please help. Thanks.
Hi Kyle,
I think I have also been having the same problems with pulseaudio on Arch. Basically pulseaudio seems to mute and zero the master channel on my sound card (its a VirtualBox machine) whenever it starts.
I asked for help on the pulseaudio mailinglist back in June [1], but nothing much came out of it.
I then gave up for a bit, but have been meaning to raise a bug on it.
So this weekend I did so [2,3].
[1] http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/pulseaudio-discuss/2012-June/013710.ht... [2] https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/31469 [3] https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=54673
Cheers,
Frank
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jude
Well, I first must say that I have no interest in removing PulseAudio from my system, as I have had perfectly good results with PulseAudio and accessibility in the past, and in spite of the bug I am experiencing now on this temporary machine, there's nothing that works as seamlessly for me as PulseAudio. I will check various GNOME and other list archives more extensively to help solve the immediate problem, at which time, I will report the solution to this list. Until then, if anyone has found a solution, please don't hesitate to post it here if I can't find it before you do. Thanks. ~Kyle -- Kyle is a droid. The whole world knows it. This e-mail shows it.
It's a bit of a dirty hack, but it works on this box, and I wouldn't hesitate to use it anywhere it's needed. If PulseAudio is muting your master volume control when it starts, first copy /usr/bin/start/pulseaudio-x11 to /usr/local/bin sudo cp /usr/bin/start-pulseaudio-x11 /usr/local/bin Edit the local copy (/usr/local/bin/start-pulseaudio-x11) and add a line similar to the following at the end of the file: amixer -D hw set Master 92% unmute Again, it's a hack, but it effectively gives all GNOME users, and hopefully anyone else on the system who starts a PulseAudio session, sound at a sensible volume. The same or similar line should be able to be added to start-pulseaudio-kde in the same way, and it can also be added to your local shell configuration/profile as well if you start PulseAudio some other way. It doesn't fix the bug specifically, but it gives satisfactory results. ~Kyle
On Sun, Sep 9, 2012 at 9:33 PM, Kyle
It's a bit of a dirty hack, but it works on this box, and I wouldn't hesitate to use it anywhere it's needed.
If PulseAudio is muting your master volume control when it starts, first copy /usr/bin/start/pulseaudio-x11 to /usr/local/bin
sudo cp /usr/bin/start-pulseaudio-x11 /usr/local/bin
Edit the local copy (/usr/local/bin/start-**pulseaudio-x11) and add a line similar to the following at the end of the file:
amixer -D hw set Master 92% unmute
Again, it's a hack, but it effectively gives all GNOME users, and hopefully anyone else on the system who starts a PulseAudio session, sound at a sensible volume. The same or similar line should be able to be added to start-pulseaudio-kde in the same way, and it can also be added to your local shell configuration/profile as well if you start PulseAudio some other way. It doesn't fix the bug specifically, but it gives satisfactory results.
I don't have this particular bug, but I guess that it is related to pulseaudio trying to save and restore the volume of the soundcard between sessions. Can you try commenting out the relevant lines in the file "/etc/pulse/default.pa" (or "~/.pulse/default.pa" if it exist) and "/etc/pulse/system.pa". The relevant lines are the ones just after the comments: ### Automatically restore the volume of streams and devices Maybe only one of them is faulty (I bet on "module-card-restore"), but you may start removing all of them and see whether it helps. Regards. -- Rodrigo
participants (6)
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Chester Wisniewski
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Frank Wilson
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Jude DaShiell
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Kyle
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mike cloaked
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Rodrigo Rivas