Suddenly no sound on 64 bit mepis/debian

[arioch]

Hi Guys,

Something... occurred to my audio on this machine, hope you can help.

I believe I heard the KDE fanfare when I booted up the first time after installation, but now - nothing.

from lspci:

00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) HD Audio Controller (rev 02)

I tried some of the stuff from here http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-940689.html Adding the boot option: kopt=irqpoll to grub

- and the three lines:

options snd-hda-intel model=3stack-dig
options snd-hda-intel enable_msi=1
options snd-hda-intel single_cmd=1

to /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base, but nothing.

An assist would be much appeciated.

Thx for reading

[JohnT]

Did you see this one?
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=661102

[arioch]

Thx for responding John.

I have restarted several times while having this problem, but today, something happened.

I went into Ubuntu on the same machine, booted down again after a while and back into Mepis and whatta ya know, sound was back! How? The volume slider in kicker doesn't work though, but when I open Kmix, the master volume slider works just fine.

How does this happen? I don't get this, weird stuff.

- and no, I hadn't seen that. Seems like a lot of trouble to get something as common as an Intel soundchip to work.

[blackbelt_jones]

Always check your permissions when having problems with audio, especially with Ubuntu, and I believe mepis is based on Ubuntu these days. Is your normal user a member of the "audio" group? I think I've actually lost audio during an upgrade once.with Ubuntu. I had it during the beginning of the upgrade, and then I didn't have it. It was fairly recently, and it was just this problem. I don't know how plausible it may be that this is your problem. I don't know how or why it happens, but it's always the first place I look and 90 per cent of the time, it's just that. That other ten per cent of the time, I don't have my speakers plugged in or something like that.

[JohnT]

Seems like a lot of trouble to get something as common as an Intel soundchip to work.

Soundchip configurations are not that simple from version to version(ICH9 Family) and after any upgrades to your distro there can be numerous things affected.

[arioch]

AFAIR, Mepis is back on the debian wagon (Lenny stable) I guess they just got sick and tired of "the Ubuntu-way" too. There's also a limit to how long I can go without KDE (3.5.10) ;)

Thx for the responses.

[blackbelt_jones]

For the sake of reference, this just happened to me again, with Kubuntu jaunty. I installed some software with apt-get, including xfce (xubuntu-desktop) and was prompted afterword to restart, and after I restarted, no audio. I checked kuser, and sure enough, I was no longer a member of the "audio", so I checked the appropriate box, logged out, logged in again, and I had fixed the problem.

I've had it happen with distros other than ubuntu. The very first time it happened was years ago, right when I was a total noob, installing Red Hat 7.3 for the first time. I think it's a good rule to have: when you're having problems with audio check permissions (including the audio group) first.

[arioch]

Ok, had to re-install due to a broken filesystem and, off course, it's happening again . Before I start going through the already suggested things here, can anyone tell me, why booting up into Ubuntu 8.04 and then back into mepis brings back sound? It comes and goes randomly in mepis and an Ubuntu-boot, always brings it back.

[Sepero]

This is what I have to occasionally use on my system:

sudo killall pulseaudio; sudo alsa force-reload

[JohnT]

Ok, had to re-install due to a broken filesystem and, off course, it's happening again . Before I start going through the already suggested things here, can anyone tell me, why booting up into Ubuntu 8.04 and then back into mepis brings back sound? It comes and goes randomly in mepis and an Ubuntu-boot, always brings it back.
Have you tried rebooting into Mepis only? Possibly it has nothing to do with Ubuntu and only a reboot. Then if Sepero's suggestion works possibly use a startup command to force an alsa load. You could check to see if the alsa modules are loading correctly on boot by the command "lsmod" (http://alsa.opensrc.org/FAQ#How_can_I_check_whether_ALSA_works.3F)

[arioch]

JohnT

I tried that, no difference.

I just added:

"options snd-hda-intel model=lg" - to the bottom of: /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.

Now it works every time.

Thx.