I have seen quite a few questions about no sound on distributions from Suse 12.3 on.
This has been my experience since 12.3. Under Yast2, the sound test works but
as a non root user there is no sound. pavucontrol gives no output devices - just dummy output.
I have installed versions of suse beyond 12.2 on three different asus motherboards: P6X58D, Z9PE-D8_WS and
a mini atx (all I believe have Realtek ALC 8988).
By no sound, I mean after a vanilla installation there is no sound on flashplayer, amarok, vlc, mplayer, etc, etc.
Swapping pulse audio in or out has no effect. (I have read the forums) Also swapping primary sound between intel and nvidia.
I use /etc/init.d/alsasound restart after easy yast2 edit (just to be sure).
Window system (motif or kdm) has no effect.
**Install with suse 12.2 - everything works ok.
**
On VLC if pulse audio is enabled, audio device gives “dummy output”), if not tries to connect to default ALSA pulse audio.
However, what I did notice today was that** I got sound just fine if I was root.**
I would really appreciate some suggestions here - I cannot believe I am the only one to have experienced these problems.
It looks like a permission problem.
Just another test I did:
Run smplayer as myself: no sound.
ssh -X -l root to the machine from my X window, run smplayer: there is sound.
Mike