Re: [LAU] Audio stopped working - troubleshooting help

On Sat, 31 Dec 2011 00:35:48 -0500,
Al Thompson <althompson58@email-addr-hidden> wrote :

> But if it WAS working with his distro, it should STILL be working with
> his distro. If it's been working for 3 years up until yesterday,
> there is no reason to expect that upgrading the distro will magically
> fix it.

That's what I would think. If the one instance of a boot in which the
EEPROM of the 1010LT could not be read is put aside, everything else
points to a recognized card. This is the latest state in which the
system was left in. The problem was that the alsa layer was giving out
a 'connection refused' error, even with alsamixer. OTOH, running
'alsamixer -Dhw' would actually run alsamixer and would show all
controls for the 1010LT.

I do not know what the -Dhw option does precisely. Bypasses the alsa
layer to access the hardware directly ?

In any case I did a quick search and just about the first audio live
distro I found was Tango Studio, Ubuntu-based. But in the end Linux is
Linux. Debian/Ubuntu folks are not doing that much actual development I
think (might be wrong). Actually, I have the impression there's much
more Linux development on the Red Hat side (SystemTap, etc...).

Anyways, booting with Tango Studio, mounting the partition with the
audio/flash files and throwing the Tango Studio mplayer at them... works
all the way. Video and sound are just fine. I could have tried Ardour
while at it, but didn't.
 
> My vote is for component failure on the audio card, or a bad MUX.
 
Rebooting into Fedora 8 then gives out the same alsa problem as before.

Likely something has changed in the F8 system. Using a live CD turned
out to be a good test after all.

I mentioned that from time to time throughout the years I had to
sometimes switch the LAN cable from eth0 to eth1 because on certain
boots, for some reason, the F8 system (probably udev who is assigning
interface devices) would think that nope, the configured IP now goes to
eth1. At other times it'd think that it had to go to eth0. So I
switched the LAN cable accordingly when seeing that ;-) Actually I
have an alias that I use to check the IP before starting any web
app ;-))

Maybe something like that is happening now that affects *somehow* the
interface to the 1010LT, even though the /dev/dsp device exists and a
bunch of other details shows that the 1010LT is present.

At that point I would need to troubleshoot the alsa layer, how
it is brought up, etc... Maybe I can subscribe to the alsa mailing
list.

Thanks for all the help ! I'd appreciate any other troubleshooting
suggestions to perhaps be able to fix this F8 system w/o upgrading
right now.

Cheers,

Al

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Received on Sat Dec 31 16:15:02 2011