Joe Klemmer wrote:
On Wed, 2006-08-09 at 01:55 -0500, tom poe wrote:
Joe: Still working on sound? You might want to explore low-latency
kernel through CCRMA. That would turn your beat-up laptop into
state-of-the-art audio/video recording machine.
ccrma.stanford.edu/planetccrma/software/ The mailing list is great
for helping solve sound glitches.
Thanks for the pointer, Tom. I'll take a look at that but I'm not
doing any Multimedia on this box. As I said earlier, I didn't even know
sound wasn't working for months because I don't do things like that on
this system. The only thing I'd like to know at this point is if the
problem is SW or HW related. All the software seems to say that sound
is working but nothing comes out. Maybe if I can dig up some external
speakers (and I have some way to connect them) I can see.
On occasion, with some releases of Fedora, on some systems, the sound was
fixed by opening a command window and typing alsamixer. This is an ncurses
program, which means it displays a "kind of" graphics interface using a
standard text console.
Then by manipulating the controls by using the keyboard (if I recall
correctly
typing an "h" gives help") the sound began working. Sometimes it was
as simple as adjusting a "slider" volume control down and up again,
sometimes by "disabling" or "enabling" various other options.
On a current system, I found that the master volume has no effect and it
is the headphone volume that actually controls the sound. (Supposedly,
there is an option for loading one of the sound kernel modules that
"reverses" the master and headphone volumes just for such systems.
I haven't yet explored that.)
The thing is, the regular "GUI" volume controls didn't seem to work
properly until after I used the command window volume control. Further,
on the one system, the GUI control runs the master and I need to run
the headphone volume to get sound.
If you haven't yet tried that (you suggested in a later post that you
had tried various alsa utilities) you might give that a try.
