Re: Current problems (ie. help sought from the brains trust)

[jedd <jedd@progsoc.org>]

 Hi John and thank you for your advice.

On Sun 2009-08-02, John Culleton wrote:
> With respect to sound problems on my Slackware system I had to
> first deal with the alsamixer settings from the command line and
> then free up some permissions in /dev.   Whether this helps or not
> on your dissimilar system I have no idea.  I use KDE 3.5 or when on
> a KDE 4 system I revert to the classic 3.5 layout. The KDE 4 layout
> verges on the silly IMO.

 I think that it's tied in with the plasma or kwin crashing, or at
 least it has a common ancestor - I'm seeing an audio error message
 (phonon dying) during the crash, with a message that my audio
 card - an M-Audio Revolution - is no longer available, and the sound
 system is reverting to the default device.  I have only one sound
 device in this machine - the onboard azalia is disabled in BIOS.

 Now, pre-Amarok-2, for the previous couple of days, I was seeing
 these crashes with this error, but Amarok 1.x (?) was working just
 fine before and after the crash and auto-restart of kwin/plasma.  And,
 as I say, these crashes themselves only started a few days ago.

 I think it's just a sound driver thing with the release of amarok 2
 into unstable.  I know I got some help on-list a few months ago with
 amarok and the phonon problem - oh, here it is - 20090621 from
 George, suggesting to install the phonon-backend-xine package.

 At the moment I have some savage inconsistencies with my dpkg
 database .. once I've resolved I'll fiddle with the phonon stuff some
 more (though the fact that amarok2 is keeling over after a few
 minutes makes me think the audio engine isn't the problem).

 J.