no sound on CMI8738 under KDE 4.1/4.2 - openSUSE 11.1

[oldcpu]

Tell me how to reset the soundcard to its defaut = make all programs used the first device for sound output or prevent KDE/Phonon to disable it. That would do it

Thats not something I normally do. You could go to IRC freenode #alsa and ask there. It may take a 1/2 dozen attempts at different times of the day for a week, before you get your answer, but if there is anywhere you are going to find the answer, then that may be your best location.

[please_try_again]

Anyway, I think you know my approach, and there is little I can do to help, other than urge you again to write that bug report.

I tried but it is too complicated: I don't have time for that filling form kind of nonsense. "that's not something I normally do". As soon as I'm asked for my zipcode, I run away. I don't know my zipcode anyway. I copy/paste my bug report. Feel free to forward it if it helps. It's a pretty nasty bug: lost of sound functionality until you reinstall the system or spend one week on an IRC channel.

In simple words, to anybody who intends to use KDE 4.1/4.2 on openSUSE 11.1: Don't use a C-Media CMI8738 4 channels soundcard! Use a 6 channels instead! It cost $10 more and works in KDE.
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OS : OpenSUSE 11.1
application : KDE 4.1 and 4.2.
severity : major
priority : medium

On a new OpenSUSE 11.1 installation, the sound is working in other window managers, desktop environments (Gnome, Xfce) or in the console until the first time KDE is started. At that point KDE disables the first sound device, and sound no longer works in KDE or any other application. Even after a reboot and even if KDE is not started after reboot, the sound is permanently disabled, allthough mixer levels (in alsamixer or other mixers) appear to be high and PCM and master channels are NOT muted, and sound tests (like speaker-test) or applications (like mplayer, mpg123) seem to function properly and don't show any error on the console or in logs. Neither reconfiguring with alsaconf, nor updating to the latest alsa driver solved the problem.

This bug affects some C-Media 4 channels PCI soundcards, i.e. C-Media CMI8738 model 37 and model 55. C-Media CMI8738-MC6 (6 channels) seem not affected. Tests were conducted under openSUSE 11.1 64bit on 2 Asus M2NPV-VM mainboards, bios rev 140, with respectively a Sempron 3200+ CPU (single core) and an Athlon X2 3800+ (dual core) and on an ASUS P5QL Pro, bios rev 0902, with Intel Core Duo E8400 CPU. To exclude the possibility of mainboard failures, the soundcards were switched between mainboards.

work around:
In KDE, under System settings, sound, show Advanced Devices and move "C-Media PCI 2nd DAC" to the top of the list for all items of sound output instead of "C-Media PCI DAC/ADC". This will bring back the login sound next time you start KDE. However applications (like Firefox) won't benefit from this change and continue to redirect their sound output to a muted device.
You can still get sound in any application which let you specify the device that will be used for sound output (like mplayer) by choosing the second device instead of the default. In all other applications, you won't hear sound at all, whether in KDE, Gnome, other X desktop environments or console.

This problem has been widely discussed in this thread :
no sound on CMI8738 under KDE 4.1/4.2 - openSUSE 11.1 - openSUSE Forums
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