Also no sound on a fresh 11.4 installation

English Multimedia
#1

After spending a full day messing with my dual monitors
displays-should-not-be-cloned-by-default, I have now come to the sound. The config looks like the 11.3 setup (I alternate partitions from one install to the next), but all I get is silence. KMix won’t run. Amrok is silent. “Sound Configuration” gets me to a window showing two cards I know nothing about. I’ve got an nVIDIA chip on the mother board and the two cards listed are “M2N72-D w/ snd-hda-intel” and “Creative Tech, Ltd. w/ snd-usb-audio”. I’d have gone back to 11.3 where this stuff works, but my configuration files were all auto-updated and don’t really work any more. I guess I ought to have archived the config files, but I didn’t and I’m here now. No easy way back. I’ve looked through some of the other threads about this problem. I’d like to find a nice, simple, “follow this recipe” approach to diagnosing or fixing this issue. I may have missed it, but I didn’t see one. Is there one? Help, please?

lspci shows:

00:07.0 Audio device: nVidia Corporation MCP72XE/MCP72P/MCP78U/MCP78S High Definition Audio (rev a1)

and some /var/log/messages entries:

Mar 14 14:18:22 beethoven kernel:  1120.311164] usbcore: deregistering interface driver snd-usb-audio
Mar 14 14:18:22 beethoven pulseaudio[21051]: pid.c: Stale PID file, overwriting.
Mar 14 14:18:22 beethoven pulseaudio[21102]: pid.c: Daemon already running.
...
Mar 14 14:18:22 beethoven kernel:  1120.800722] usbcore: registered new interface driver snd-usb-audio
Mar 14 14:18:38 beethoven pulseaudio[26008]: pid.c: Daemon already running.
...
Mar 14 14:18:39 beethoven pulseaudio[30854]: pid.c: Stale PID file, overwriting.
Mar 14 14:18:40 beethoven pulseaudio[30904]: pid.c: Daemon already running.
...
Mar 14 14:19:40 beethoven pulseaudio[30854]: ratelimit.c: 7 events suppressed
Mar 14 14:21:39 beethoven pulseaudio[30854]: ratelimit.c: 44 events suppressed
Mar 14 14:35:11 beethoven pulseaudio[30854]: ratelimit.c: 176 events suppressed
Mar 14 14:46:35 beethoven pulseaudio[30854]: ratelimit.c: 38 events suppressed

with duplicate events suppressed with ellipses by hand.

#2

I am working my way through this page: SDB:Audio troubleshooting - openSUSE and this:

speaker-test -c2 -l5 -twav

works, but the next step using Yast does not produce sound and the yast volume settings have no controls available. I got to the point where I was to use “alsaconf” and that program doesn’t seem to know what it is. Should I try the alsaconf that is installed on the openSuSE 11.3 image? Sounds dangerous to me…BUT it knows what the sound system is.

#3

Using the little tart, I find that

speaker-test -Dplug:front -c2 -l5 -twav

is no longer working. Regression:

speaker-test 1.0.24.2                                                         
                                                                              
Playback device is plug:front                                                 
Stream parameters are 48000Hz, S16_LE, 2 channels                             
WAV file(s)                                                                   
ALSA lib pcm.c:2212:(snd_pcm_open_noupdate) Unknown PCM cards.pcm.front       
Playback open error: -2,No such file or directory

But then, I followed the other page’s advice and deleted and re-added the sound device. I guess not sound advice.

#4

On your 11.4 try installing the application ‘pavucontrol’ and then run ‘pavucontrol’ and then launch an audio application to play sound, and see if you can tune the output device in ‘pavucontrol’ so as to get sound.

#5

Cool. But why should this have been necessary? Do I need to always be running pavucontrol,
or did this program fix the issue? THANK YOU! Of course, I still cannot print anything
because support for a USB Brother printer got dropped somehow…

#6

It should remember the last configuration you had set and hence not necessary to run for ‘that’ application. You may need to run it again for a different application. I think it keeps track of settings on a per-application basis.

Thanks unfortunate. But I confess I’ve never seen consistent Brother printer support in the entire time I’ve been using Linux (since 1998). Sometimes they can be made to work with Linux. Sometimes they can’t … which is why I won’t purchase their hardware.

Good luck with your efforts.

Did you try contacting Brother for support ?

#7

Did you try contacting Brother for support ?
No, I found the answer elsewhere. Manually edit /etc/cups/printers.conf and replace “usb://Brother/MFC-8420” with “parallel:/dev/usb/lp0”. In other words, treat the USB device as if it were hung off the parallel port. Once you do that, the system thinks it doesn’t need the usb printer, so you have to manually:

rmmod usblp
modprobe usblp

Not for the feint of heart.

WRT: pavucontrol – thank you so much! I now have working sound and video (not choppy any more). So, I have now reverted to using 11.4 as the primary boot. The only weirdisms are the module reloading of usblp and the KDE bug wherein the task bar will pop up and never re-hide.

Sadly, in summary, openSuSE is not for the neophyte with an nVIDIA video card controlling dual monitors or with a Brother printer.

#8

Glad to read you made some progress. Congratulations.

Indeed ! So true.