[olug] Debian Sound Problem

[Daniel Linder]

On Tue, August 21, 2007 07:33, Russell Monaghan wrote:
>   Thanks for the links. I checked out both parts, but they didn't seem
> to help me much.
> Most tools I've used say it's working, but I still don't have sound. It
> says the system device or resource is busy, so I thought maybe some
> other device might be hogging the resources. I played around with that
> idea a bit, but I didn't get anywhere. I might still try a few things. I
> was also reading that KDE likes to take over ALSA, and since I have it
> installed, I checked it out. Normally I use GNOME, so I didn't see how
> KDE could be doing anything if it wasn't running, but I turned of the
> sound system under it anyway. Nothing. So I don't know. Sound used to
> work okay when I first installed Debian, but it seems to have dumped on
> me.

In KDE, if you open up the System Settings and go to the "Sound System"
icon (first page), does it have "Enable the sound system" checked?
What are the other check boxes on the "General" tab set to? (Networked
sound, Skip Prevention, and Auto-Susped.
If you press the "Test Sound" button, does anything come out?
Did you test the sound with a "Live CD" boot of your distro?  Did that work?

If you pull up a command line and run this:
  sudo dd if=/dev/urandom bs=1024 count=2 of=/dev/dsp
Do you hear "static" from the speakers, or does it return this error message:
  dd: opening `/dev/dsp': Device or resource busy
If so, turn off the sound system in the KDE "Sound System" control panel,
and re-try.  (When you disable the sound system, KDE kills it's "artsd"
sound daemon which was keeping the audio devices busy.)

Report back what the status is of these tests.

Dan

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