I have a new laptop, Dell 7559 with Windows 10 on the first drive SSD and OpenSUSE Leap 42.1 on the second drive (spinner). The installation of Leap went well and after having to set up the sound card in YAST all was fine.
But sometimes when I restart the laptop into Leap, I have no sound in Leap. I have checked in all the obvious places (I hope), and in Pavucontrol the headphones output I use shows a signal - I have a dancing blue bar, but no sound from the attached speakers. After a few days I recognised a pattern, if I had first used Windows 10 and then rebooted into Leap I had sound, if I booted directly into Leap on powering up, no sound, although pavucontrol was still showing a headphone signal. First logging into windows 10 a workaround but it is not very convenient. Any help welcome as I prefer to use windows only if I have to.
One idea to obtain more information which might (or might not) shed some light on this is to do the following.
Start with laptop switched off.
Boot the laptop direct to GNU/Linux. Confirm sound does not function. Then with PC connected to the internet, as a regular user, run in a xterm/konsole this diagnostic script (being careful to select the SHARE/UPLOAD option and let script run to completion):
/usr/sbin/alsa-info.sh
and after script is complete it will provide a web-address/url where detailed PC configuration information was uploaded. Record that URL.
Then reboot to MS-Windows. Prove audio works. Reboot to GNU/Linux and test sound. Confirm it works. Then run the same script in an xterm/konsole as a regular user with pc connected to internet:
/usr/sbin/alsa-info.sh
again record the URL (it will be different).
You can post the two URL links here in this thread and when doing so please provide an explanation as to in which one sound works and in which one it does not work.
The plan would be then to do a document compare between the two, and see if the differences discovered yield any hints as to the problem.
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Thanks oldcpu for your response. Another problem cropped up and I have been dealing with that.
After an update Leap would not shutdown, that is using the shutdown, restart or logout buttons in KDE caused the system to dim the the screen and stay there. Pressing any key would restore the session and allow me to poweroff from a terminal. I could then reboot and use snapper to restore to an earlier timepoint. After a several restores trying to find the cause, I have found that it is the KDE Frameworks update openSUSE-2016-287 which caused the problem. I now do not allow this update to load after trying three times on different days.
On the plus side, I have had been able to to reboot several times now direct into openSUSE without losing the sound. I did notice that when I used iceWM to restore with snapper that I lost sound when logging back into KDE. I’ve not repeated this often enough to worry about it at present but will report back if it is truly repeatable or becomes a nuisance. Longer term, I’m more concerned about not being able to apply update openSUSE-2016-287.