Sound stopped working (again!)

[mittfh]

After a routine update the other day, my sound (ALSA rather than Pulse) suddenly stopped working - analysis indicated my system had decided it wanted to use my USB webcam as the default sound device. Putting my sound card as the default device in .asoundrc and rebooting didn't appear to have any effect, so on a whim I downloaded and installed the latest drivers (Realtek Linux Audiopack 5.17). Except that even though the compilation and installation seemed to go without a hitch, while MCC --> Hardware --> Sound tells me it's using snd_hda_intel (as expected), aplay -L and aplay -l inform me I haven't got any sound cards installed...

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[ben@BlackBox ~]$ aplay -L
null
    Discard all samples (playback) or generate zero samples (capture)
pulse
    PulseAudio Sound Server
[ben@BlackBox ~]$ aplay -l
aplay: device_list:252: no soundcards found...


Among the standard troubleshooting steps, lsmod indicates that snd_hda_intel isn't loaded, but modprobe fails...

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[ben@BlackBox ~]$ sudo modprobe -a snd_hda_intel
ERROR: could not insert 'snd_hda_intel': Invalid argument

I've also attached the relevant dmesg output - it's not very happy! So can anyone deduce what am I (or my system) doing wrong - or if I've given insufficient information, any further troubleshooting steps I can take...

[mittfh]

As an experiment, I uninstalled / reinstalled task-xfce4 then rebooted, not expecting much (apart from lxde to take over as login manager so fixing the suspend/hibernate/shutdown issues I'd had because I didn't RTFM and notice the problems with Slim login manager and those activities)...

...and, whatdayaknow - it also fixed my sound issues. Without looking through the list of stuff the metapackage installs, I can't say what specifically is likely to have fixed it (given I use ALSA rather than pulseaudio, I doubt the pulse components would have had any effect as they presumably aren't being used), but it has...

[jaywalker]

Just a thought ... I had problems with the Slim login manager during Cauldron testing for MGA2 and one of the problems was the way it messed up user authentication. For me this was manifest when trying to mount external usb drives (it always thought I was somebody else and needed root privileges). Perhaps it was interfering with your rights to use sound stuff? I use only the LXDE desktop and ALSA with or without Jack and since I disabled pulse I have not had any issues with sound which didn't have obvious solutions - apart from braindead program builds which don't seem to be able to imagine a world without pulse (eg. LiVES).

Anyway, just a thought... Glad it is working for you now.

Richard

[EDIT]
I really should learn to take the advice I readily and silently give to others; do not post on a forum when you are feeling a bit peeved. It is never a good idea and often turns out to be a very embarrassing thing to do.

I did it here. I blamed LiVES for something of which it is entirely innocent. What makes this so embarrassing for me is that the problem which caused my moan was a simple bug in LiVES which was fixed by the core developer within a few hours of becoming aware of it.

Thank you salsaman, I apologise for the unwarranted criticism I made above of your quite excellent video editor.
[/EDIT]

[doktor5000]

For the record, partly documented as https://wiki.mageia.org/en/Mageia_2_Err ... dm_or_slim

[mittfh]

About a week later, following a reboot, sound suddenly stopped working again. Immediately before the reboot, it was working fine. It's the same issue as before: no sound cards detected, dmesg reporting problems inserting snd-hda-intel (except this time it's also decided it doesn't like rawmidi).

So far I've tried forced in-place reinstalls (urpmi --replacepkgs) of alsa-* (since for obvious reasons alsa can't be uninstalled - at least not via the graphical tools), kernel-desktop, kernel-firmware-nonfree and even task-xfce4 (albeit as that's a metapackage I had to uninstall / reinstall it) - no joy.

I attach the results of alsa-info and a simple script I wrote based on the commands Mageia recommends for troubleshooting sound issues. Understandably, I'd like to avoid the nuclear solution of [ backup / wipe / reinstall / restore ] if possible

[jaywalker]

I just had a quick look at your alsa info file and it looks strange to me. I don't understand why it is reporting a different alsa driver version from the one I have installed when using the same kernel as you have.

That might explain the mis-matched module version messages in the dmesg output. Have you built/installed a local copy of the alsa driver modules and forgotten to update the build for a kernel update?

Richard