When will we ever have an upgrade with sound that just works ?

[Antonio Olivares]

--- On Fri, 7/24/09, Linuxguy123 <linuxguy123 at gmail.com> wrote:

> From: Linuxguy123 <linuxguy123 at gmail.com>
> Subject: When will we ever have an upgrade with sound that just works ?
> To: "Community assistance, encouragement, and advice for using Fedora." <fedora-list at redhat.com>
> Date: Friday, July 24, 2009, 9:38 AM
> I've been using Redhat/Fedora since
> RH8.
> 
> It seems that every time we get a new version sound gets
> broken and I
> have to go through a whole complicated and convoluted
> troubleshooting
> sequence to get it running again.
> 
> Wireless networking used to be like that and now it seems
> to work
> release after release.  When will sound get the same
> attention to detail
> that Wireless got ?
> 
> Sound worked just fine in F8 and F10, after some fiddling,
> of course.
> Along comes F11 and I've got nothing, in spite of spending
> literally
> days mucking and fiddling around.  The pundits say
> that the problem is
> my complicated, unsupported sound card (Intel HDA), but it
> worked just
> fine in F8 and F10 and it hasn't changed since.  If it
> ran fine in F8
> and F10, why should it suddenly be OK to NOT run in F11 ?
> 
> The funny part of all this is the pulse audio
> component.  Pulse audio
> seems to be bug ridden.  There doesn't seem to be any
> real documentation
> for troubleshooting it.  And yet one gets chastised if
> one says they
> want to remove it and run without it.
> 
> Oh, yeah... I forgot... Fedora is bleeding edge.  The
> funny thing is
> that we've been bleeding on the sound card issues since RH8
> and there
> doesn't seem to be any end in sight.  And I would
> hardly call sound
> systems leading edge in this day and age.
> 
> When (and how) will this madness end ?
> 
> 
> -- 

With sound I guess I have been lucky.  I have run Red Hat 8.0 Redhat 9, then skipped FC1 and went into FC 2, 3, ..., and all inbetween till now Fedora 11.  I have run rawhide since Fedora Core 5 Test 2 release on some machines I own, and once in a while sound breaks(broke) with update(s).  But it came back and it worked again, but from Fedora 8 onward many have complained that pulseaudio was causing much more trouble than it helped fix?  I left it on, with many messages that sound was not available on .... card reverting to ....., but I did have sound.  Then there were no messages, but I did have sound and I hear you about sound alsa problems.  I had a Toshiba laptop that did not have sound and I downloaded and installed alsa from source and I managed to get sound, then I let Fedora update the machine and sound broke again, but thankfully other users had the same problem(s) and there came some workarounds and I got sound for good since Fedora 8 onwards. 
 However, when I try to output to alsa, sometimes the sound server dies and have troubles.  

I get messages like:

ALSA sound/pci/hda/hda_intel.c:1102: Too big adjustment 32                      
ALSA sound/pci/hda/hda_intel.c:1102: Too big adjustment 32                      
ALSA sound/pci/hda/hda_intel.c:1102: Too big adjustment 32                      
ALSA sound/pci/hda/hda_intel.c:1102: Too big adjustment 32                      
ALSA sound/pci/hda/hda_intel.c:1102: Too big adjustment 32                      
ALSA sound/pci/hda/hda_intel.c:1102: Too big adjustment 32                      
ALSA sound/pci/hda/hda_intel.c:1102: Too big adjustment 32                      
ALSA sound/pci/hda/hda_intel.c:1102: Too big adjustment 32                      
ALSA sound/pci/hda/hda_intel.c:1102: Too big adjustment 32                      
ALSA sound/pci/hda/hda_intel.c:1102: Too big adjustment 32                      
ALSA sound/pci/hda/hda_intel.c:1102: Too big adjustment 32                      
ALSA sound/pci/hda/hda_intel.c:1102: Too big adjustment 32                      
ALSA sound/pci/hda/hda_intel.c:1102: Too big adjustment 32                      
ALSA sound/pci/hda/hda_intel.c:1102: Too big adjustment 32                      
ALSA sound/pci/hda/hda_intel.c:1102: Too big adjustment 32 

But I have sound, and I can't complain, but something in /etc/modprobe.conf ? /etc/modprobe.d/modprobe.conf ??? (which supposedly got depracated) fixes(fixed) your issue.  Did you save the settings that worked before so that you can put them back?  Also could you boot a Fedora 10 Live CD and see if there is sound and take a look at the alsa settings and run the famous ./alsa-info.sh file and see what the differences are and make changes to see if that can correct your problem.  

I somehow have had other issues.  But nothing that could not be fixed.  I have to use a winmodem to connect to net, and the drivers are compatible for 64 bit so I have 64 bit Fedora 11 installed.  The drivers compile fine and all, but the important program to dialout is not created.  Solution:  I install a kernel from kernel.org and the driver builds without problems and works so I use a vanilla kernel with Fedora kernel config, but for me it is OK, I run the latest 2.6.30.2 on that machine and am happy.  

Sometimes sound works and an update(s) breaks it?  This happens once in a while.  What does the end user do?

Don't give up, let's see how we can try to fix this or help you get sound.  If you feel like removing pulseaudio, do so.  It is your machine and no one should tell you what to do with your machine!  But do rememeber that pulse* is only one part of the equation, and they also say that it could be an alsa problem?  Where does the blame lie?  This is a question that one has to ask?  

Regards,

Antonio