No Audio

Good day, I’ve installed OpenSUSE Tumbleweed not to long ago

Everything seems to work just fine except from the sound output, for some strange reason I cannot seem to get any sound from the device. Although the volume mixer in the taskbask says it’s output is on 91% and the output device is called dummy output.
I stumbled uppon some older threads when searching for an answer, and I’ve generated this link to print the system information

http://www.alsa-project.org/db/?f=85...c98b3ffc63eda3

Does somebody know what could be the problem?

Unfortunately that link is broken. In the link the ‘dots’ were copied instead of the ‘text’ that the ‘dots’ represented. Please could you try reposting it again with all text ? I can then take a look at it to see if it yields some hints as to the problem.

Thanks !

http://www.alsa-project.org/db/?f=8536a1c0389dd2bde8f3beebadc98b3ffc63eda3

Thanks, I note an Aspire SW3-016 with an snd_soc_sst_bytcr_rt5640 sound module loaded, with pulse audio running. I confess this is the first I have heard of the snd_soc_sst_bytcr_rt5640 and I am amazed by the massive mixer selection.

I do note thou in the mixer MANY of the playback options are OFF. Are they supposed to be off ? I ask that knowing nothing about your hardware. For example:


**Simple mixer control 'Speaker Channel',0**
  Capabilities: pswitch
  Playback channels: Front Left - Front Right
  Mono:
  Front Left: Playback [off]
  Front Right: Playback [off]
**Simple mixer control 'Speaker L',0**
  Capabilities: pswitch pswitch-joined
  Playback channels: Mono
  Mono: Playback [off]
**Simple mixer control 'Speaker R',0**
  Capabilities: pswitch pswitch-joined
  Playback channels: Mono
  Mono: Playback [off]
...........


There are also MANY more mixer settings off, and my not knowing (never seen before) a sound device like yours, I do not know which ones MUST be on and for which ones being ON or OFF does not matter.

They can be turned on presumably with the application “alsamixer”, or if necessary by command line using the application ‘amixer’ (which is a LOT more difficult as one must get the syntax perfectly correct).

Do you need any help there wrt those apps ?

That’s actually quite weird to hear as you see the Acer aspire sw is just tablet computer and just like a phone has a build in video output device, it worked before when it did run on Windows 10 enterprise in the past

If you could kinda exlain me about the alsamixer as when i type it for example in my program search bar as im on a KDE gui enviroment it doesn’t show up, I thought I was missing something. So I thought why not so i tried
zypper install alsamixer but it said it doesn’t exist. When I tried typing alsamixer in the console it came up with a program with a black background where I can put in some settings but I have no idea where to go from there.

Use a terminal ( Konsole ), then start alsamixer. Also, check in YaST whether HDMI or other has been recognized as the primary soundcard

The tablet computer only has a mini HDMI port on the left side but it’s not in use and has never been used before, as far as I can tell the primary sound card is correct but I have no idea how to use alsamixer

I suppose its possible there is a bug on openSUSE and the wrong audio device loaded ? Truly the quantity of mixer settings in that script output are the largest I have ever seen.

Here is what I do (when looking for alsa mixer) in a konsole/xterm:


oldcpu@linux-os1a:~> whereis alsamixer
alsamixer: /usr/bin/alsamixer /usr/share/man/man1/alsamixer.1.gz
oldcpu@linux-os1a:~> rpm -qf /usr/bin/alsamixer
alsa-utils-1.1.2-1.2.x86_64

From that you can see alsamixer comes with the app ‘alsa-utils’. Do you have alsa-utils installed ?
.

To use alsa mixer:

  • Open a terminal (ie konsole/xterm)
  • Enter “alsamixer” and press the Enter key.
  • You will now see a user interface. In this user interface, you can do the following:
    [LIST]
  • Select your correct sound card using F6 and select F5 to see recording controls as well
  • Move around with left and right arrow keys.
  • Increase and decrease volume with up and down arrow keys.
  • Increase and decrease volume for left/right channel individually with “Q”, “E”, “Z”, and “C” keys.
  • Mute/Unmute with the “M” key. An “MM” means muted, and “OO” means unmuted. Note that a bar can be 100% full but still be muted, so do check for this.
  • Exit from alsamixer with the Esc key.

[/LIST]

Oke well now I have to check what to turn on and there is so many options

Indeed. That was the problem I had. I’m very surprised to see a device with so many options - which is why I am speculating the hardware could have been misidentified and the wrong sound module loaded.

Do you know of anyone who has GNU/Linux running on this hardware ?

Further to my speculation, I have read of users in other GNU/Linux distributions with hardware very similar to this struggling to get sound working. In one case a user claimed success by installing the alsa-firmware. However their hardware was not identical to yours, and further when I check the alsa-firmware rpm list of files I see no reference to the rt5640 which is mentioned in the diagnostic script output in the script you were kind enough to run.

Still, if you are up to very speculative efforts, you could install alsa-firmware to see if it changes the hardware detection and results in a different sound module loaded that has a far less extensive (and less confusing) alsa mixer setting. Again - this is a speculative suggestion of mine.

Well all the people around me are just regular windows users, so not really :open_mouth:

Honestly - my speculation about installing alsa-firmware may be bad advice. If you do that, and if it does not help, then de-install alsa-firmware.

Well this is what it kinda looks like when I open the alsa mixer, note I’ve changed to xfce desktop enviroment

http://i68.tinypic.com/2qis21v.png

So I get like a lot of types of different speaker choices? with this I tried to put all of them on full volume but no sound whatsoever.

Hopefully someone else will chime in to help. I do not think I can.

As for me, I do not use XFCE. The XFCE menus ring no bells with me, and I have NEVER even once tried to use them nor anything even remotely approaching such a selection. Its truly bizarre from my point of view and very definitely specific to your hardware and XFCE (IMHO). Further I don’t have your hardware. There are other unknowns as well (such as not knowing what your sound test consists of … ) but in truth wrt my limited ability to help, the first two pretty much block any way I could be helpful.

Good luck and hopefully (1) someone who uses Xfce, and (2) has your hardware, … can help.