No non-root sound in Fedora 14

Interax · #1 19th March 2011, 08:42 PM

I have just installed Fedora 14. x86-64 edition. It is my first experience of using Fedora.
Alas, I am having problems getting sound working for the normal user. I enabled root access to see if it was a permissions thing. Clearly it is. Sounds work for the root account. I have been reading a lot of posts to see what I can change.
Nothing has worked yet. I have put myself in the audio group in /etc/group, but it does not help. For some reason pulseaudio will only work for root. I am being denied access to /dev/snd/* even though I am in the audio group and the permissions of the files in /dev/snd allow read/write access to the audiio group.

lspci -v | grep audio
00:04.0 Multimedia audio controller: nVidia Corporation CK804 AC'97 Audio Controller (rev a2)

Can anyone please suggest what I should do?

JohnVV · #2 20th March 2011, 05:01 AM

have you added your normal user to the " audio " group
under
users and groups
you might also need to add "pluse" to your own group

search the forums here
there are many many pages on this

Interax · #3 20th March 2011, 01:48 PM

Thank you for your reply.
I tried all the permutations with permissions in /etc/group. In the end, after a lot of wasted time, I had to remove pulseaudio. Now sound works, but the sound system is slightly broken.
1) There is no volume control applet on the gnome panel.
2) I have a multi-user system. Between reboots whoever logs in first holds the sound server. If that user logs out and another user logs in, then the second user cannot get sound. He has to reboot and be the first to log in to get sound. All users are in the audio group, but in Fedora 14 it does not seem to make any difference whether they are there or not.

Do you, or does anyone know any way of fixing these problems, particularly the second? Thanks in advance.

smr54 · #4 20th March 2011, 03:40 PM

Way back around Fedora 8, one had to sometimes edit /etc/security/console.perms.d, but that was usually for those who weren't using Gnome. (It was an issue with consolekit, and rather than fixing it, they just made consolekit, almost impossible to disable.)

I have a very dated page on this at http://home.roadrunner.com/~computer...u/rhsound.html

Note that it was written around the time of F8, and I have no idea if any of it is still applicable--I haven't had any of the problems mentioned there since F10 or F11.

Interax · #5 21st March 2011, 12:54 PM

Thank you smr54 for your reply. I have read your old howto with interest.
From this:
The avahi-daemon is running in run-levels 3, 4, and 5.
ConsoleKit is installed but the command:
/sbin/chkconfig --list ConsoleKit
returns an error.
/etc/ConsoleKit is empty apart from this file: .../seats.d/00-primary-seat
[Seat Entry]
Version=1.0
Name=Primary seat
Hidden=false
Devices=
which does not seem to do anything.
How do I use ConsoleKit in Fedora 14? I cannot find any information on this.
I created a /etc/security/console.perms.d/50-default.perms file with the entry specified in your old howto, but it did not improve the situation which is currently:
1) I have restored a volume control applet in the system tray by installing GMixer. I get a report that GMixer has crashed the first time that it is used, but this does not seem to stop me changing the volume. However the control-volume-slider does not dock with the gnome panel, but appears in the top left of the monitor screen.
2) New user still has to reboot rather than login to get full system sound for CD, DVD, music files, however sound with YouTube videos watched in Firefox is available after a login following a logout.
3) System/Preferences/Sound no longer works but hangs "waiting for the sound system to respond"

I have completely removed pulse and feel that alsa needs some configuring, but I am not sure how to do this in Fedora14.
Any more help would be appreciated. Thanks.

smr54 · #6 21st March 2011, 01:36 PM

The only help I can give with your questions here is that part of the "fix" was to make ConsoleKit difficult to remove. Therefore, it's probably running.

As pulse hasn't given me much problem lately, I don't know how much more difficult it's become to remove it.. Again, although I get errors when using, for example, mplayer, about being unable to start the pulse daemon, sound works for me.

JohnVV · #7 21st March 2011, 08:39 PM

by cahnce when you installed 14
is it a DEFAULT install ?
or did you pick and choose what to install?
if so fedora's installer is notorious for messing a "custom" install up

Interax · #8 21st March 2011, 09:16 PM

Thanks for your help anyway, smr54. I suppose we can live with these imperfections, but I'll go on looking for a solution. It must be a simple permissions thing, somewhere isn't it?
JohnVV. It was a default install. I agree that the installer could have been better. There were one or two niggles. For instance I wanted the home folder partition to use reiserfs, which wasn't an option. It also didn't give me the option of installing the grub boot info to the master boot record of the drive fedora was installed to. I had to force it by disabling the other hard drives during the install. It wanted to use the master boot record of the first hard drive, which would have messed the Ubuntu Grub 2 bootloader which I usually use. That was rather thoughtless. Linux usually tries to be polite and accommodating unlike a well-known commercial competitor.
Anyway, now that I have uninstalled pulse, I assume that it is alsa which is giving the sound. It is difficult to be sure because alsa keeps a low profile in Fedora 14. What commands should I give to stop and restart alsa? I thought it was worth a try for the next person to login after a logout (rather than a reboot).

Interax · #9 25th March 2011, 12:25 AM

Does no-one know how to stop and restart alsa in Fedora 14? You used to be able to use commands:

sudo /etc/init.d/alsa-utils stop

sudo alsa force-reload

sudo /etc/init.d/alsa-utils start

These are not applicable to Fedora 14. How is it done now? Does no-one know?

smr54 · #10 25th March 2011, 01:07 AM

Fedora (and many other desktop distributions) have pretty much changed their installers to be as, or more, inflexible as those well known commercial distributions. In the old days, it was fairly easy to remove pulseaudio, but at this point, it's become quite hard. You might try

http://www.fedoraforum.org/forum/sho...d.php?t=237230

untested by me, to see if it works.

In fairness, pulse doesn't bother me anymore since they got it to the point where it pretty much works. Therefore, I haven't kept up on whether it's easy or difficult to get rid of it.

http://fedoraunity.org/Members/fenri...nd-workarounds

deals with pulseaudio, but not how to get rid of it. It seems to be becoming the default in most Linux distributions now.

JohnVV · #11 25th March 2011, 01:23 AM

Quote:

Does no-one know how to stop and restart alsa in Fedora 14? You used to be able to use commands:

sudo /etc/init.d/alsa-utils stop

???????
fedora has been using pulse audio since fedora 8
pulse audio overrides alsa and oss as the system default

so unless you changed things .....
also fedora has NEVER used "sudo"
fedora can use it but it is NOT installed nor set up by default
so for

Code:

You used to be able to use commands:

sudo /etc/init.d/alsa-utils stop

YOU had to have installed sudo and have had to set it up

Interax · #12 25th March 2011, 04:03 PM

Thanks to both of you for your replies and for trying to help.
smr54 Thanks for the links. I tried:

Quote:

http://fedoraunity.org/Members/fenri...nd-workarounds

when I was trying to get pulse to work, but nothing there helped at all, and I eventually removed pulse completely, giving some success.
JohnVV you wrote:

Quote:

fedora has been using pulse audio since fedora 8
pulse audio overrides alsa and oss as the system default

Perhaps this is where the answer to the problem lies. Maybe the system is still thinking that pulse is the default sound server. Perhaps this is why System/Preferences/Sound just hangs, "waiting for sound system to respond."
How do I set the system default to alsa now that pulse has been removed?
To recap:- the minor problem that I have is that the second user on this multi-user system has to reboot and then login to be able to control the sound devices. The first user's control of them is not relinquished as they should be when the first user logs out. Obviously a complete reboot wastes time, as a logout/login is a much quicker process.
I tried adding the following code to /etc/gdm/PostSession/Default:

Code:

/etc/init.d/haldaemon stop
pkill hald
sleep 1

Then adding this to /etc/gdm/PreSession/Default:

Code:

/usr/sbin/hald
-
-
daemon=no --verbose=yes

but either these files are being ignored on login, or I am on the wrong lines here thinking that a restart of the haldaemon will solve the permissions problem.
Am I on the wrong lines here?
Should I try stopping and restarting another process instead? Which process?