Mysteries of sound in Fedora-9

[Antonio Olivares]

--- Timothy Murphy <gayleard at eircom.net> wrote:

> 
> I'm finding it very difficult to understand
> the Sound setup in Fedora-9 with KDE.
> 
> Previously, sound did not work at all when I
> re-booted.
> But after some unrecorded sequence of clicks
> on f=>Applications=>Multimedia=>Sound Mixer
> it suddenly started working.
> 
> Today, I wondered if the problem was something to do
> with pulseaudio, so I tried killing this and
> re-starting it.
> But I got the more or less incomprehensible error
> message below:
> ----------------------------------
> [tim at elizabeth ~]$ sudo killall pulseaudio
> [tim at elizabeth ~]$ sudo pulseaudio -D
> W: main.c: This program is not intended to be run as
> root (unless --system
> is specified).
> [tim at elizabeth ~]$ pulseaudio -D
> N: main.c: Called SUID root and
> real-time/high-priority scheduling was
> requested in the configuration. However, we lack the
> necessary priviliges:
> N: main.c: We are not in group 'pulse-rt' and
> PolicyKit refuse to grant us
> priviliges. Dropping SUID again.
> N: main.c: For enabling real-time scheduling please
> acquire the appropriate
> PolicyKit priviliges, or become a member of
> 'pulse-rt', or increase the
> RLIMIT_NICE/RLIMIT_RTPRIO resource limits for this
> user.
> ----------------------------------
> 
> So I added myself to the pulse-rt entry in
> /etc/group with vigr
> (and the shadow file with vigr -S).
> Then I pressed ctrl-alt-backspace and logged in
> again.
> 
> Now I get sound, but it is very quiet,
> although every slider that I can see is pushed to
> the maximum.
> Also the loudspeaker in the panel has disappeared.
> I thought this was the icon for Sound Mixer,
> but I find this is not so;
> when I right click on Sound Mixer and add the icon
> to the panel
> it is quite different.
> 
> Surely I cannot be the only person having these
> problems
> with Sound under Fedora-9?
> I should say that this is on an IBM ThinkPad T23.
> 
> Multimedia and in particular Sound is easily the
> weakest chain
> in Fedora, and has been for several versions of
> Fedora.
> The whole Sound system is absurdly complicated,
> and disentangling it is like eating spaghetti.
> 
> I'd like to say to the Fedora and KDE sound teams,
> "Please don't add or subtract anything
> until you have properly documented what is already
> there.
> Try adding some test files, and check that your
> error messages
> are comprehensible, with advice on what steps to
> take."
> 
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> 

I have seen many warnings that "**** so so package is
unavailable and will not be used fallback to other *?"
and sound works.  I still hear sound, I logout and log
back and I see the same warnings :(  I guess I am
guessed to it.  I type 
$ alsamixer 
and I see a slider with only pulseaudio in some cases,
and in others I see an error that pulseaudio ....?

KDE used arts sound system, still uses it?  The
integration of pulseaudio on it caused a great deal of
frustrations --> see Fedora 8 in case you need to be
refreshed.  It is working its way up and still not
there yet :( "FOR ALL USERS".   Other distros have
also included pulseaudio, Ubuntu, Mandriva, but not
all of them.  The sound configuring tool has been
removed from Fedora  *** cut + pasted from release
notes ***

8.1. Sound Card Utility
 
 The system-config-soundcard utility has been removed,
due to numerous legacy design and implementation
issues. Modern technologies, including udev and the
HAL, have made certain sound cards work out of the
box. Any sound card not working out of the box should
be reported as a bug. Preferences can still be
fine-tuned within the desktop environment, using,
among others, the PulseAudio tools.

and some users are having difficulties getting sound
to work, maybe their sound cards are not supported :(
and it is not Fedora's fault or maybe sound used to
work before and now it does not :(.  

For more information you can view the following thread
maybe it can be of help:
http://fedoraforum.org/forum/showthread.php?t=188345

These are some "Unsolved Mysteries".

Rega