So Close

…and yet so far.

I’ve been slowly bringing my Fedora Core 9 box up to full utility, and had a major breakthrough today, in that I finally got flash/shockwave running in Firefox. The problem now? No sound.

When I go System/Preference/Hardware/Volume Control, I get the message: “No volume control GStreamer plugins and/or devices found.”

I’ve checked, and Gstreamer and Gstreamer-plugins-good are installed. I tried G*-plugins-bad and ugly, but they weren’t to be found in the repository (is this a 64-bit problem?). Anyway, anyone have any idea what the problem might be? Is there some command line to detect the sound card (it’s built into the board)?

12 thoughts on “So Close”

  1. Adobe has no idea how to do sound under Linux. Eventually they gave up and added an API that other people could write libraries to to make it work. Those libraries then support the various sound servers etc. on Linux.

    Google “libflashsupport”. I don’t use Fedora, but I use libflashsupport on my Gentoo machine, and it works well. It might do what you need on Fedora.

  2. This isn’t an Adobe problem. Or at least I don’t know yet if it’s an Adobe problem.

    I have no sound. Period.

    I have never had sound on this box, because until today, I didn’t care that much.

  3. Make sure you have ALSA installed. That is the current standard for linux sound.

    Gstreamer is a system for chaining signal processors, filters, and handlers, and should eventually talk to some kind of sound driver. ALSA is typically that sound driver. It may be that GStreamer is not loaded because Gnome detects that there are no sound drivers to talk to.

    You need to install ALSA and make sure it is working. There are lots of HOWTOs online.

  4. OK, I did “yum install alsa*”

    It installed a bunch of packages, and no joy. Same error message on the volume control.

    And why is not this a standard install with the Fedora installation? Who wouldn’t want sound?

  5. OK, when I “# lspci | egrep -i audio”

    I get

    “00:14.2 Audio device: ATI Technologies Inc SBx00 Azalia (Intel HDA)”

    But when I look in /proc/asound/cards, I get

    “— no soundcards —”

    So do I have to install a module, or what? Why, by the time we get to Fedora Core 9, is this still such a PITA?

  6. Yes. You need to tell it to install the correct module.

    Try “modprobe snd-hda-intel”

    If that works, you will need to add “alias snd-card-0 snd-hda-intel” to your modules.conf.

    Now, it’s possible that Fedora expects you to edit another file that it copies into modules.conf, so be aware of the possibility.

    But, once you get that bit in there, alsa will know which driver to use for your soundcard and load it when /etc/init.d/alsasound is run during bootup.

    Try running “/etc/init.d/alsasound start” manually and see if ALSA seems happy. (Caveats about me not being a Fedora user apply here. Please modify as appropriate).

  7. Try “modprobe snd-hda-intel”

    I did that. No complaints.

    If that works, you will need to add “alias snd-card-0 snd-hda-intel” to your modules.conf.

    According to locate, I have no modules.conf…

    # locate modules.conf
    /etc/gnome-vfs-2.0/modules/default-modules.conf
    /etc/gnome-vfs-2.0/modules/ssl-modules.conf

    add “alias snd-card-0 snd-hda-intel” to your modules.conf.

    When I try it from command line, I get:

    # alias snd-card-0 snd-hda-intel
    -bash: alias: snd-card-0: not found
    -bash: alias: snd-hda-intel: not found

    Try running “/etc/init.d/alsasound start” manually and see if ALSA seems happy.

    # /etc/init.d/alsasound start
    -bash: /etc/init.d/alsasound: No such file or directory

    (Caveats about me not being a Fedora user apply here. Please modify as appropriate).

    I wish, as a Fedora user, I knew how to “modify as appropriate.” This is the sort of thing that makes people think that Linux still isn’t ready for prime time. Thanks for the attempt, though.

  8. I am an Ubuntu user.

    Fedora 9 uses ALSA and PulseAudio for sound as well. Fedora has no sound init script in /etc/init.d.

    /etc/modules.conf was used with 2.4 series kernels,
    /etc/modprobe.conf is used with 2.6 series kernels.

    In case this issue wasn’t fixed in Fedora 10, I advise you post a ticket in http://bugzilla.redhat.com, so they will fix it in future releases. They will likely ask you to post the output of ‘alsa-info.sh –no-upload’ script from the ‘alsa-utils’ package for issue tracking.

  9. I would start with running “system-config-soundcard” and see how well that works. If it can play the test sound, save the old /etc/modprobe.conf just in case and let it write out the new one. In most cases nothing else is required.

  10. Indeed, it was a bogus advice. I forgot that we deprecated s-c-s between Beta and release. Hmm…

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