Fresh install of OpenSUSE 11.2 and I’m having issues with sound. Installed what I needed for various codecs (mp3, dvd etc etc). Sound now plays through applications yet when I go to Control Center and try to adjust the Sounds, I get a dialog box that says “Waiting for Sound System to Respond” and it just hangs there.
This is an old Shuttle box with Nvidia onboard everything.
I’ve selected all pulse and alsa packages and did a reinstall on them to no avail.
Any tips on how to fix this?
Now I can get the sound mixer to work BUT the desktop sounds are “overdriven” but if I slide the volume to “just one spot” the desktop sounds are perfect. Then if I change the volume for applications (like Amarok or any multimedia app) it is overdriven. Setting the application volume in the control panel then lets the sound be ok in apps but then the desktop sounds are overdriven…nothing I do can fix the overdriving sounds.
I have it so applications sound ok but I cannot fix the desktop sounds…
Anybody???
I’m an avid KDE user. A very BIG KDE user. But I did decide to try Gnome on a “sandbox” PC in a separate boot partition (with a separate / and /home from a KDE install on same PC).
I really liked the look of Gnome. Very nice. The feel I did not like but I was able to tune it so that I liked it.
But the sound implementation in Gnome is horrible. KDE mostly works in comparison to Gnome, when it comes to sound, and I believe the main problem here is Pulse audio (which is disabled by default in KDE) does not yet work well in Gnome for all audio hardware.
You could take a look here in step #7: SDB:AudioTroubleshooting - openSUSE - step#7
for example, on my sandbox PC, sound in Gnome was horrible until I went to one of the “sublinks” from that above link ( PulseAudio - openSUSE ) and I followed this guidance:
Glitches in audio playback
Edit /etc/pulse/daemon.conf: uncomment the default-fragments and default-fragment-size-msec, and change values from the default 4 and 25 to 16 and 21.
Note what you find necessary may be different.
I’ve had sound since not long after my most recent install – I can play music – but I haven’t had system sounds. And when I clicked on the Gnome sound preferences I got the sound not responding message. So I did what I always do in alsamixergui after a new install. When you open it you see a number of columns with vertical sliders with which you can set the volume (it should be more than zero;)). And at the top of each column is a little pair of what look like speakers or headphones. I just click on all of them, and some of them will turn white, which apparently means activated – and then sound works. I did that this time – sound already worked but I couldn’t get the sound preferences to come up – and then re-enabled pulseaudio, which I’ve been disabling because I mistakenly thought it was part of the problem. Then I logged out of the desktop, logged back in, and I still had sound, as in music, but I also had system sounds and now the Gnome sound preferences application works. I don’t know if re-enabling pulseaudio did the trick, or if I originally missed something when I went through my usual post-install alsamixergui routine. Probably the latter. Hope this helps.
Pointyears, you said the magic words!
Never in a million years would I have otherwise figured out that plain white speakers in AlsaGui were “active” while colored speakers with vibration-looking lines coming out were “inactive”. That did the trick and now I have EVERYTHING working in 11.2.
Thanks. I owe you a beer or something. lol!
I’m glad my experience was relevant to your problem. Lots of people have helped me in the past. It’s always nice to have the opportunity to do the same for somebody else. Thanks for the (virtual) beer!