[arch-general] GDM and/or PulseAudio mute my sound

[Rodrigo Rivas]

On Thu, Aug 16, 2012 at 9:28 PM, Kyle <kyle at gmx.ca> wrote:

> 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