Sound/Wireless/Boot issues in 11.2

English Hardware
1

Hello all,
First, a bit of background. Last year, I made the Big Switch from Windows to Linux (at first testing, then permanently when I killed XP). I have been using Ubuntu 9.04 and currently 9.10 for awhile now, and have tested out several other distro’s just for fun. I must say, I am impressed with how far linux has come in the past 10 years.

Now, on to the problems at hand. In Ubuntu, almost all of my hardware connected right out of the box (I’m sure you’ve heard this sob story before). The only problems I’ve had with that was getting the wireless to work; I now have some shell scripts I’ve put together that use ndiswrapper to get it up and going within 15 minutes after a fresh install, and it works from then on with no problems. My only other concern was that the 3D from my Radeon isn’t that good, but that’s no bog concern right now.

So, long story short, I downloaded the openSUSE 11.2 usb install, set it up, booted it live and watched the magic happen. KDE is beautiful as always, and I must admit that I’m impressed with the distro’s power. I installed to the HDD, eventually reinstalled GRUB2 from Ubuntu, and got to work (notice, all of the following happened with either distro’s copy of grub, in fact openSUSE’s grub caused more problems).
HOWEVER, I do have a few concerns:

  1. Sound. I spend probably 50% of my computer time listening to music, browsing the internet, or (usually) both. In the LiveUSB mode, sound worked perfect; the login/logout sounds worked nicely and any extra noises worked too.
    Now, I boot into the HD install and get error messages saying my Realtek AC97 isn’t working. Of course, to complicate things, if I go into the YaST->Hardware->Sound and do a sound test, it works great; just, everything else doesn’t work sound-wise.

  2. Wireless. I have a Broadcomm BCM4318 AirForce 51 card; as I mentioned, I used Ndiswrapper in Ubuntu to get it working. In openSUSE, the wireless light on my laptop’s case glows (as it does when it’s operating fine), the system recognises that it’s there, but I can’t manage to connect to the internet. Is there some process you must go through to locate and connect to a wireless router? Do I HAVE to manually enter all of the information of my router or is there an option to scan for networks? I used a scan button in the network manager and it just showed a map with an image of a PC with four ‘waves’ going to the right. Maybe a tutorial on setting up wlan would be helpful.

  3. Boot. Well, this is more of an annoyance than anything else…when I boot into openSUSE, it shows the scrolling text as it loads everything and, at the very end, manages to fail to boot into rootlevel 5, going to 3 instead. All I have to do is type “startx” and it’ll boot into the desktop GUI, but is there a way to tell the system to run that command automatically? (p.s. another “fix” mentioned finding ‘xde’ and setting it to run on level 5, my system only has xde.rej which I thought was odd).

System specs:
Compaq Presario V5000 (v5005us)
-AMD Sempron 2.0GHz
-1.25 GB RAM
-100GB 7200rpm HDD
-ATI Radeon Xpress 200M (a 4xx (480?) series card, integrated, 128mb gfx)
-ATI Technologies Inc IXP SB400 AC’97 Audio Controller (the Realtek AC97)
-Broadcom Corporation BCM4318 [AirForce One 54g] 802.11g Wireless LAN Controller (rev 02)

Let me know what else you’d need to know, I’ll see what I can do to find it. I’m more than happy to use the terminal for things, but I don’t know openSUSE-specific terminology yet :wink:

Thanks ahead of time for the help!

2

Sound: Is often just a mixer/channel issue, from the tray see if you can check. Particularly as you say tests work. It’s probably simple. But anyway here:
SDB:AudioTroubleshooting - openSUSE

Wireless: Check the HCL
HCL/Network Adapters (Wireless) - openSUSE
But I understand you need Compat from this
http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/broumbroum23/openSUSE_11.2_oss/HCL-WIFI.ymp

Boot: Leave that for now

3

I confess reading this, I do not understand the problems you are experiencing. Are you saying sound does not work outside of YaST on your USB device?

Is your USB device plugged in all the time. If so, is it first in order of priority? If not, try making it first per step-9: SDB:AudioTroubleshooting - openSUSE - step9

You also could consider adding your user to group audio per step-6:
SDB:AudioTroubleshooting - openSUSE - step6

4

Thank you both for the quick responses.
@caf4926, I’ll try booting openSUSE and using a hardwire to try those, I figured that I’d probably overlooked something anyways :slight_smile:
@oldcpu, sorry for not making it clear, I seem to have left out a whole paragraph (not that I NEED to write more). When I booted from the liveUSB, the sound worked fine (and X did too). However, I’ve installed it to the harddrive, and now it won’t work (which means it’s something simple). My error with starting X is also since I’d installed it to the HDD.

Thanks again, will get back on this.

5

Since I can’t edit the post, detailed information on sound card: http://www.alsa-project.org/db/?f=cfbe9fbf45ab5e8e9f92acbe1d873e991b32474f

6

Well, now here’s a good one: I don’t know what happened, but my wireless card all of a sudden started “working”. It detected my wireless network, connected to the router, has the correct ip/dns et all, only a couple problems…

  1. it’s reading at going at 1 Mbit/sec, normally I get transfer rates of around 50-60 Mb/sec.
  2. any webpage I try to navigate to while on the wireless, it instantly gives me the “Server Not Found” page, which I’d usually get if there was no internet connection. Uhm, what? Ping through the terminal also returns the same…

So, when unplugging a wired connection (notice, its an ethernet cable plugged into the same router that’s not giving me wireless), do you have to set preferences or something?

EDIT: as for the sound, Kmix just shows a blank window. I’ll try to get it set up some other way.

7

That was strange !! I note this:

!!Amixer output
!!-------------
!!-------Mixer controls for card 0 [IXP]
Invalid card number.
Usage: amixer <options> [command]

Invalid card number? I’ve never encountered that before.

The rest of the script notes a 32-bit openSUSE-11.2 on a Presario V5000 (ET820UA#ABA) with 1.0.20/1.0.21 alsa and a Cx20468-31 sound device.

The Cx20468-31 is not familiar to me. Yet you say sound worked on the USB ?

A search on the alsa web site gave this:
Search results - AlsaProject … which indicates support was added in 1.0.20 of alsa

Perhaps you could reboot your PC, and then immediately after rebooting as a regular user type:

dmesg > mydmesg.txt

and then open ‘mydmesg.txt’ with a text editor and copy and paste the contents to PasteBin.be and press “dump” on that page to post it. It will give you a URL. Please post here the URL. Just the URL. Maybe the dmesg will give us a hint.

8

Will do. Right now, I’m in the middle of a download of the multimedia restricted stuff, shouldn’t take too long.
As for the soundcard, I remember waaay back in windows that it’s/it used something called “Conexant AC-Link audio”. I don’t know if that’s helpful.
I noticed the 1.0.20 on the site also. Would it be safe to upgrade to the beta? That’s the ONLY hit I saw on the site when I searched.

EDIT: here you go: pastebin

9

heh, right, I already have 1.0.20 alsa…I tried using that to configure the sound, could that odd error be due to a messed-up configuration?
The pastebin is in my previous post.

10

What do you mean when you say you “tried using that to configure the sound” ?

I note this in the demesg:

    6.615011] ATI IXP MC97 controller 0000:00:14.6: PCI INT B -> GSI 17 (level, low) -> IRQ 17 
.....
    6.755075] ALSA /usr/src/packages/BUILD/kernel-default-2.6.31.5/linux-2.6.31/sound/pci/ac97/ac97_codec.c:2163: MC'97 0 converters and GPIO not ready (0x1)
    6.755951] ATI IXP AC97 controller 0000:00:14.5: PCI INT B -> GSI 17 (level, low) -> IRQ 17

“GIPO not ready” strikes me as not nice.

11

I saw that too. I’ll google and see what comes up.
On one of the sound card fixes I found in the documentation, it said that you should try using Alsa to configure your sound card. Since I was sort of blundering in the dark, I may have set it up wrong; I’ll try fixing that later.
I’ll get back later this evening, I have to head off to work.

12

Update: Something funny’s going on here…
So through some extensive trial and error, I’ve come to the conclusion that alsaconfig doesn’t help me at all. I am able to use YaST to configure my sound and, lo and behold, when I run the YaST test it works. Also, if I open a terminal and run
speaker-test -c2 -l5 -twav
as root, the voice works fine. But when I open Amarok I get an error message (also appears briefly when I first boot into the desktop): “Phonon: KDE’s Multimedia L…” then says that my sound card isn’t working.

I booted back onto the LiveUSB that I have and the sound miraculously works, kmix and all. Perfectly. So I’m going to have to assume that it incorrectly configures or writes to disk the files, or maybe it’s a problem in modprobe.d? It’s 12:35AM and I need to get some sleep, will check back in the morn. :wink:

13

YES! I got sound working!
Quite a stupid simple fix really…while browsing the forum for issues with rc97 cards, I found another discussion. One suggested fix )I believe it was by you oldcpu) said to make sure permissions were fixed. So, I navigated to the page within YaST and guess what? I was not set as a member of any groups!

This also may be the solution to my internet problem, will post back here if that works.

14

Alas, that wasn’t meant to work for the wireless. So, an update on that:
It recognizes my card perfectly, loads great, automatically connects to my router, shows the correct ip address/dns servers/domain even, but when I get on any browser it just pops up with a “server not found”. Note that my hardwire that I’m using is plugged into the back of the same router that the wireless is connected to, so it’s not a router/internet problem.

Is there a permission that covers wireless?

EDIT: How about a firewall problem?

15

…and, miracle of miracles, I managed to fix that too! (Good thing I’m getting no sleep). I simply had to go into MAnage Connections and create a connection without “use only for resources on this connection” checked. Piece of cake. Now I can get my 500mb of updates while I get some shuteye.

Thanks again for all the help.

16

On openSUSE, the application alsaconf creates an /etc/modprobe.d/sound.conf file. That file is no longer used in openSUSE-11.2. Instead openSUSE-11.2 uses an /etc/modprobe.d/50-sound.conf file. Thus alsaconf is depreciated for 11.2.

YaST on the other hand, will for most hardware devices (exception is X-Fi) will create a proper /etc/modprobe.d/50-sound-conf file.

That message may not be relevant. Have you installed the packman packaged libxine1 ? Have you selected xine as your backend sound engine in Amarok? Have you gone to KDE configure desktop > General > Computer Administration> Multimedia > Device Preference > Audio Output > Music and ensured you have an Output Device Preference for the ‘Music’ Category that makes sence? Under KDE configure desktop > General > Computer Administration> Multimedia > Backend what do you have selected ? Try selecting xine.

Also, do you have phonon-backend-xine (from SuSE) installed? Do you have libxine1-pulse (from Packman) installed?

Reference your user’s group permissions, they are setup as part of the installation setup. If your user belonged to no groups, that suggests to me either you had a bad install, or you previous deliberately removed them. If you had that bad an install, you may want to give thought to re-installing (assuming your downloaded DVD/CD was good).

17

Xine was set as the backend engine by default (in fact, I found no other options). I think that what I need at this moment in time is to finish the multimedia downloads from the Packman repo (I had to end those early thanks to accidentally adding them to my 500mb’s of updates). Sound otherwise works after I adjusted the permissions, and the wireless was fixed as mentioned above. I’ll start a new thread if Amarok still gives me troubles, but that error message concerning Phonon does not appear any more since the ‘permissions’ change.
Thanks again for your help, it turned out to be a simple solution for a problem I overcomplicated.