[Leaplist] Alsa problems with Debian Etch

[Mark W. Alexander]

On Sun, Mar 30, 2008 at 12:53:25PM -0400, Hank Lambert wrote:
> I have installed Debian Etch on my Gateway 7330GZ laptop. I am tackling 
> what I believe is my final hurdle, alsa is not working. ESD is working; 
> I have system sounds and can play music through Amarok as long as esd is 
> selected as the xine output plugin. As soon as I select alsa as the 
> output plugin, I get a "xine was unable to initialize any audio drivers" 
> error.

Alsa is the set of sound drivers for physical sound cards. esd is a sound
service daemon whose point is to enable multiple clients to access the sound
hardware by abstracting the interface away from the physical devices. I'm not
very familar with esd, but if it has exclusive control of the sound devices
anything that tries to play sound without going the esd is going to fail.

> So the help that I need is either to get alsa working, or find out how 
> to get Totem and VLC to use esd for sound. I have training videos that I 
> use for work that are AVIs, and I need to be able to play them. I 
> installed the latest alsa-driver, alsa-lib, and alsa-utils, ran 
> alsaconf, and unmuted all selections in the volume control. I also added 
> the external amplifier in the volume control and de-selected it. Still 
> no alsa. I am not opposed to using esd exclusively as long as I can use 
> them across the board.

Try shutting down esd and _then_ try your non-esd aware applications.

> When I ran cat /proc/asound/cards, I got the following:
> 
> Case:/home/hank# cat /proc/asound/cards
> 
> 0 [I82801DBICH4   ]: ICH4 - Intel 82801DB-ICH4
>                                     Intel 82801DB-ICH4 with unknown 
> codec at 0xe02ff800, irq 169

Which means you're using alsa.

> The unknown codec led me to believe that might be the problem, so I 
> installed VLC. VLC runs the avi's at about 1 frame a second, not real 
> conducive to watching videos. Regardless, it dtill didn't have any audio 
> output. I looked in the various settings, but I found nothing to help me 
> work with audio. Opening the avi in Amarok did produce audio, so I know 
> their is audio with the avi. Here are some of my other tests:

I doubt it. That's "I don't know what that codec on that chip is" not "I don't
know how to play the codec in that file."

[snip]
> If someone can point me in the right direction, I would really 
> appreciate it. I have Googled this for days now, and can't seem to find 
> my answer. I am working on April 5th, so I do not know if I will make 
> the Installfest, where I am sure I could have gotten it fixed.

Stop esd and try VLC and totem with alsa. If that works, find out how to
configure them to use esd or switch to arts. Or maybe PulseAudio since that
seems to be the future path.

-- 
Mark W. Alexander
slash at dotnetslash.net

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