I recently installed Leap 16 on a computer with an Nvidia GT710 card. I soon realized that, although video worked well, I got no sound over HDMI. The sound applet in the notification area (KDE) showed the device but when I went to test it I would get anywhere from silence to a pop, or rarely a complete “Front Channel Left” announcement, and no sound was produced from any applications. After much trial and error and head-scratching, I found that if I disabled pipewire and reverted to pulseaudio the sound then worked.
A minor drawback, however, was that the sound icon in the notification area was gone and the “Sound” entry under “Input & Output” in the System Settings applet was gone.
Since I would rather have sound and no applet rather than an applet and no sound, I can live with this. But I was wondering if anyone had any suggestions about how to bring those settings applets back.
This is all with the ‘nouveau’ driver. I tried installing the nVidia driver but it won’t load, probably because the card is too old.
Can you start by showing us the output from
aplay -l
Is the NVidia device shown? You can try using alsamixer to unmute any “HDMI channel enumerated there. Restart pipewire and see if it works again.
There’s a chance that it is due to some power management issue with this audio device. You could try the following:
In /etc/default/grub, append:
nouveau.config=NvClkMode=auto
Then:
sudo grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/grub2/grub.cfg
and reboot. YMMV.
Other than the above, it may be that a bug report is required.
With Leap 16 restored to its default configuration, with pipewire as the sound server, I get this:
steve@HTPC:~> aplay -l
**** List of PLAYBACK Hardware Devices ****
card 0: NVidia [HDA NVidia], device 3: HDMI 0 [H/K AV AMP]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 0: NVidia [HDA NVidia], device 7: HDMI 1 [HDMI 1]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 0: NVidia [HDA NVidia], device 8: HDMI 2 [HDMI 2]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 0: NVidia [HDA NVidia], device 9: HDMI 3 [HDMI 3]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
In addition, the “Sound” applet correctly identifies an “HDMI Display Port” and offers several speaker configurations (Stereo, 5.1, 7.1). Alsamixer does not report any muted channels.
So it appears that the device is recognized but pipewire does not send the sound signal out properly.
I tried
nouveau.config=NvClkMode=auto
but this seemed to have no effect.
The fact that I get sound out of pulseaudio indicates that the problem is not with the nouveau driver but with pipewire. I am not sure how or where to submit a bug report.
I cannot be the only one out here using Leap 16 with a nVidia GT710 video card but I have not seen any other reports of a similar problem. Maybe it is something unique about my setup.