I have an HP laptop DV7 that came with two 200G hard drives. I kept the first with Windows Vista and the HP recovery partition and reformatted the second drive to use Linux.
I split the second HD into three partitions to allow me to recover easier in case of problems. A 60 GB root partition, a 140GB /home partition and a small swap partition.
I loaded Kubuntu onto the system and used it through two different upgrades of the Kubuntu KDE environment. At no time did I ever get sound to work on my laptop. Pulseaudio failed and it would default to the Intel HDA analogue but still no sound. For over a year I tried every fix that was ever written on fixing the sound under both Ubuntu and Kubuntu. I loaded GNOME over Kubuntu to try and localize the problem to something in KDE. It got very confusing but still no luck.
So I decided to try OpenSUSE. As I was loading the system onto my / partition I decided to load GNOME as my desktop. Amazingly everything worked right out of the box!! Sound was working. I loaded proprietary codecs and could play wmv files and youtube. Amazing!!
With great confidence in OpenSUSE, I downloaded RC1 (build 0334) and reloaded the system but chose KDE this time. Not everything went as expected.
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The default desktop loaded without a taskbar or any applications showing. I could not get the taskbar back.
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The sound failed with the (usual?) warning that PulseAudio failed and the system was defaulting to Intel HDA analogue (so familiar). However, the sound does work to some degree but all the sound flutters and stutters chopping up the audio.
I was able to solve the first problem by remembering that if you delete the .kde hidden folder in your home directory, the system will rebuild the .kde folder. So I did this and got the normal desktop back. So, this problem was related to kde leftovers in my /home partitions that OpenSUSE KDE was using.
However, I do not know where to go to do the same thing with the sound problem. I am pretty sure the sound problem is a leftover from the Kubuntu KDE environment. However, even on the OpenSUSE forums people were complaining about Pulseadio. So, is it or isn’t it a Kubuntu to OpenSUSE issue??
I tried going to various locations to try to find the config files to return audio to the default settings but I don’t know KDE well enough to do this.
Does anyone know how to address this problem??
My only other fix is to reload OpenSUSE and use GNOME which I know works perfectly.
Thanks,