Re: [Sheflug] sound loss

[Chris Warburton <chriswarbo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Saturday 20 September 2008 11:59:39 robert fallis wrote:
> I'm running Ubuntu 8.4 in a recent online upgrade to the new kernel I lost
> my sound
> system, I've mucked around with all the controls to no avail, does anyone
> know how to get it back please?
>
> bob

Sound's become a bit trickier of late, since Ubuntu switched to PulseAudio. A 
lot of people had problems which they "solved" by turning it off and using 
plain ALSA. Since it's an update which has done it you might be able to tell 
from which package it was (linux-something then it'll be a driver, libasound-
something or alsa-something then it'll be ALSA, something-pulse or pa-
something then it'll be PulseAudio).

You can start PulseAudio with "pulseaudio" and stop it with "pulseaudio -k". 
I'd recommend stopping it then starting it, so see if there are any errors. 
You can test whether ALSA is working by stopping PulseAudio and using "aplay 
something.wav" (there are a lot of Wav sounds in the /usr/share/sounds folder 
to test with). You can test PulseAudio by using "paplay something.wav" (as 
long as the pulseaudio server is running) to see if that's at fault.

If it's ALSA then it may be a driver issue or a configuration issue. If it's 
PulseAudio's fault then it's a configuration issue.

See where that takes you :)

Chris

_______________________________________________
        Sheffield Linux User's Group
  http://www.sheflug.org.uk/mailfaq.html
 GNU - The choice of a complete generation