For the first time ever I got a problem with my Debian system that I
can't fix on my own. That says alot about Debian in general and I'd
like to thank everyone involved.
Here's the rundown. Sorry if it's long winded. I updated about a month
back and my sound stopped working. No problem, I hardly ever use it
anyway; Probably fix itself with an update I'm thinking. That hasn't
happened and so now I've finally invested the time to fix it. I didn't
know anything about how the sound really worked, it's always just
worked, so this has been a learning experience. The worst thing about
this is that I don't know how it was working before - Was I using alsa
or pulse? being the biggest question.
Here's what I do know:
Up to date Wheezy/Gnome on amd64
Dell Latitude D630 8GB Ram
lspci | grep audio:
00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) HD Audio
Controller (rev 02)
System Settings>Sound>Hardware:
Nothing listed and I'm guessing this could be a problem but nothing I
do has an effect
System Settings>Sound>Output:
Dummy Output Stereo --- Even google don't know what this means
/var/log/syslog | grep alsa:
pulseaudio[2909]: [alsa-sink] alsa-sink.c: Error opening PCM device
front:0: Device or resource busy
/var/log/syslog | grep pulse:
pulseaudio[2855]: [pulseaudio] sink-input.c: Failed to create sink
input: sink is suspended.
pulseaudio[2998]: [pulseaudio] server-lookup.c: Unable to contact
D-Bus: org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.NotSupported: Unable to autolaunch a
dbus-daemon without a $DISPLAY for X11
pulseaudio[2998]: [pulseaudio] main.c: Unable to contact D-Bus:
org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.NotSupported: Unable to autolaunch a
dbus-daemon without a $DISPLAY for X11
Occasionally I get an error when trying to play something saying
default device could not be found. Sometimes I get an error when
trying to play something saying default device is busy.
I was getting an error stating that "/usr/share/alsa/pulse-alsa.conf
may be old or corrupted: consider to remove or fix it". This error
actually yielded some promising results on google. There was problems
back a few months but none of the solutions helped my problem and I
seem to be the only fool having this problem recently.
My conclusion is it has something to do with Gnome but their
documentation sux. This is reinforced by the fact that that annoying
beep (or bark in my case) at login still works but that's the last
sound the system makes. I have not tried to use an /etc/asound.conf as
seen some places because the way I understand things is that the
pulse-alsa.conf was supposed to replace that file and is no longer
needed. Thank you in advance.