Until yesterday I was living the Linux dream. I had my computer working like a charm but I wanted more and I installed Virtualbox. It asked for some drivers and the kernel source for compiling them. After a reboot VB was working ok but sound was gone.
I’ve done some tests for solving the problem with no luck:
reinstalled all ALSA packages
reinstalled all pulseaudio packages
reisntalled all phonon packages
regenerated /etc/alsa-conf
rechecked all sound settings under YAST (volume), everything looks good but there is no sound
rechecked all sound settings under System preferences > Multimedia > phonon (gstreamer and xine are installed, gstreamer is the default engine)
speaker-test 1.0.24.2
Playback device is plug:front
Stream parameters are 48000Hz, S16_LE, 2 channels
WAV file(s)
Rate set to 48000Hz (requested 48000Hz)
Buffer size range from 64 to 16384
Period size range from 32 to 8192
Using max buffer size 16384
Periods = 4
was set period_size = 4096
was set buffer_size = 16384
0 - Front Left
1 - Front Right
Time per period = 2,731825
0 - Front Left
1 - Front Right
Time per period = 2,987049
0 - Front Left
1 - Front Right
Time per period = 2,987001
0 - Front Left
1 - Front Right
Time per period = 3,157335
0 - Front Left
1 - Front Right
Time per period = 2,901735
I concede that puzzles me. I don’t understand why you wish to demonstrate no sound with a low volume setting of 52% ?
Another question - Since you note you visited SDB:Audio troubleshooting - openSUSE , then I assume you saw the section that explains how to determine which application is using the audio device. What did you see when you ran that command line check after freshly booting and then again after running virtual box ? Do you have sound in either case?
If you restart your sound driver with (root permissions) with ‘rcalsasound restart’ and then restart your mixer, did you check to see if that restores sound ?
But in truth , with volume down at 52% no other suggestions are likely to help.
I decided to take extreme measures and uninstalled all ALSA and pulseaudio packages using YAST, restarted and reinstalled only alsa and pulseaudio without any plugins. After reboot sound came back.
Now I’m willing to see if I can reinstall Virtualbox.
Glad to read sound is working again for you. If by removing alsa and pulse, and re-installing alsa and pulse you managed to get sound working again, then that suggests to me there was possibly a configuration issue that by re-installing those apps you managed to have corrected. What I don’t understand is what you mean by “without any plugins” ? What apps did you exclude?
Also if sound is a ‘configuration’ issue, then one’s desktop selection comes into play (ie xfce ? lxde ? gnome ? kde ? ) . In the case of KDE, in addition to tuning sound under YasT > Hardware > Sound, one also has kmenu > configure desktop > multimedia > phonon where one can control the order of sound devices. Its nominally important in KDE to be consistent between YaST and the phonon selection but given different nomenclature is used, that can be puzzling at times (IMHO). My view is by also installing the application pavucontrol and running pavucontrol (and tuning in that app) to configure one’s sound setup, one has better control over the sound and its configuration.
Reference this quote - there are about 1/2 dozen different permuations of the speaker test, and my experience is it is not uncommon for a few of them NOT to give sound and a few to give sound, so this test by itself is likely not a valid test to see if sound is working. I can provide some additional sound tests if you like. I think the troubleshooting guide you quoted suggests at least 3 different tests.
This suggest a configuration issue with pulse or with the alsa sound driver auto detection.
Note that is not adequate by itself. One must restart their mixer and then try to tune the sound with the desktop selections.
Then you have sound, and had sound all along in terms of the alsa sound driver. What this suggests to me is pulse audio (which a previous lsof command showed running) was not configured properly. The application ‘pavucontrol’ would have helped you configure that (since you noted you failed doing same with phonon).
