Bug#702614: No sound after Wheezy installation

[Daniel Chester <chester@mail.eecis.udel.edu>]

I continue to have sound problems.  You suggested that I adjust the mixer
settings in LXDE, but I can't find them. My LXDE was installed from the
Debian repository, either during the network installation (if it gave me
the option to select it, I don't remember for certain) or immediately after
with an apt-get install command.  When I use the lxsession-edit command, none
of the options listed have anything to do with audio.

LXDE comes with tha LXMusic program for playing audio files and it comes up
loaded with a short sound file, but there is no sound when I play it. The
Preferences screen in LXMusic shows this under the Audio tab:

Output
  Plugin: Advanced Linux Sound Architecture
  Device: default
  Mixer: PCM
  Buffer Size: 32768 KB

After looking at additional web pages about sound problems with Debian and
LXDE, I found the following facts, which show that some alsa packages have not
been installed but should have been. These facts are all about the responses
I get on my laptop after installing Wheezy and LXDE.

The command dpkg -l | grep alsa finds bluez-alsa:i386 and xmms2-plugin-alsa
but no other alsa packages.

The command dpkg -l | grep PulseAudio finds only libpulse0:i386.

The command dpkg -l | grep mixer finds nothing.

The web pages I looked at suggested several commands to try, but I found that
the following commands are not found by the Bash shell.

aplay
alsactl
alsaconf
/sbin/chkconfig

While several of the web pages suggest installing a package like gnome-alsamixer
or some other package, I have not seen any web page that suggests that the
normal procedure is to manually install a mixer package after installing LXDE.

Daniel Chester
Associate Chair
Computer and Information Sciences
chester@cis.udel.edu

On Sat, 9 Mar 2013, Ben Hutchings wrote:

> Control: tag -1 moreinfo
>
> On Fri, 2013-03-08 at 20:09 -0500, Daniel Chester wrote:
> > Package: installation-reports
> >
> > Boot method: network
> > Image version:  http://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/wheezy_di_rc1/i386/iso-cd/debian-wheezy-DI-rc1-i386-netinst.iso
> > Date: February 27, 2013, 5 pm EST
> >
> > Machine IBM Thinkpad X31
> > Processor: CPU family = Intel Pentium M 1300mHz, CPU ID = 695
> > Memory; 20GB (The specs say 20 GB, but we detected only 16GB when partitioning)
> [...]
> > 00:1f.5 Multimedia audio controller [0401]: Intel Corporation 82801DB/DBL/DBM (ICH4/ICH4-L/ICH4-M) AC'97 Audio Controller [8086:24c5] (rev 01)
> >  	Subsystem: IBM Device [1014:0534]
> >  	Kernel driver in use: snd_intel8x0
>
> So a sound driver is loaded.
>
> > The install appeared to go well. I chose the LXDE desktop environment and
> > installed Midori and SBCL.  But then I discovered that there is no sound.
> > There was an error message on booting that said that pcspkr was already
> > registered.  I added the blacklist snd-pcsp line to fbdev-blacklist.conf and
> > that fixed the error message.  But there is no evidence that anything
> > associated with alsa was installed.  For example, /usr/sbin/alsa does not
> > exist.  Even vi does not beep when you expect it to.
>
> This depends on the configuration of the terminal emulator.
>
> > I would expect that
> > Wheezy would come with the appropriate sound software installed.
> >
> > I am in the audio group.  When I look in /dev, I don't see anything like dsp
> > or pcm.
> [...]
>
> /dev/dsp is ancient history (OSS).  ALSA sound devices appear under
> /dev/snd.
>
> In a fresh installation, the initial mixer settings are likely to be
> silent (or very quiet).  I expect that LXDE has a volume control or
> mixer application you can use to adjust them.  Let us know whether you
> continue to have a problem with sound.
>
> Ben.
>
> --
> Ben Hutchings
> Always try to do things in chronological order;
> it's less confusing that way.