fraser via Dng said on Fri, 12 Sep 2025 13:22:04 +0100

>I know this has been 'discussed' on dev1glaxy, but I have not yet found
>a solution to this problem and I've been working on it for several days
>solid, although the problem behaviour is a few months old.
>
>Background:
>Since the last 2 or 3 kernel upgrades, the audio has stopped working,
>unpredictably and starts working, unpredictably. It's not failing
>hardware: two of the laptops fail and then resume at the same time,
>side by side. If it helps, one of them (a Lenovo Thinkpad)
>occasionally screams in pain. Sometimes a fix survives a reboot,
>sometimes not.
>
>I have removed, purged, reinstalled alsa, pulseaudio, pipewire,
>upgraded all the firmware, reinstalled chimaera and upgrading in
>sequence, installing from backports in almost every combination but the
>behaviour is the same unpredictable fail/work/fail/work.
>
>The only reliable solution that I have found for the Dell Precision
>6800M is to re-format and do a clean install of chimaera. The sound
>works reliably, but any upgrading to daedalus results in the
>fail/work behaviour, and doesn't disappear on a subsequent upgrade to
>excalibur. I have reinstalled chimaera four times in the last 36 hours

[snip symptom output]

>Any pointers would be welcome.
>
>Best, fraser

Why not stick with Chimaera for awhile? I've looked at your previous
few emails, and most were about problems you had with Daedalus.

Now if you *must* have a later version, be aware that sound is
incredibly complicated. If I'm not mistaken, Pipewire requires
Pulseaudio, and Pulseaudio requires ALSA. My first suggestion is this:
Back up your .asoundrc and then delete it. My (Void Linux) computer is
working perfectly without that file; .asoundrc tends to just increase
the opportunities for problems.

First of all, make sure any normal user who needs the speakers to work
is a member of the audio group.

Your email was long and dense so I might have missed it: Did you ever
perform the following command:

speaker-test

The preceding command should play white noise through your speakers.
The preceding command cuts through a lot of sound bullshit and often
gets the job done when youtube and VLC and the like fail.

My suggestion is that you install one sound component at a time.
Install only ALSA, with no .asoundrc, and try speaker-test. Make sure
to run alsamixer so you can adjust the volume and remove any mutes on
the audio device you're using (F6 lets you choose the audio device). If
speaker-test doesn't play white noise with the volume up, troubleshoot.

Once speaker-test works with ALSA, install Pulseaudio and pavucontrol,
then try running speaker-test again.

Pulseaudio is a mess. You need to run it pulseaudio permanently.
Personally, I recommend turning OFF anything that runs pulseaudio on
boot, login or X, kill any instances of pulseaudio running. Then make
sure of the following:

* You're in group audio
* In /etc/pulse/client.conf, and ~/.config/pulse/client.conf if it
exists, be sure to have autospawn=0 . This disables the tricky-dicky
just-in-time running of Pulseaudio, which can turn into a debugging
nightmare.

Now, as yourself, not root, on a terminal emulator, run the following
command:

/usr/bin/pulseaudio --daemonize=no --exit-idle-time=-1

--daemonize=no keeps it in the foreground where you can observe it, and
    --exit-idle-time=-1 once again prevents the tricky-dicky
    just-in-time running that turns debugging into a week long affair.

Run pavucontrol so you can look for mutes. Any time you restart
pulseaudio be sure to kill and restart pavucontrol: I won't explain
why, but take my word for it. Try speaker-test and do more debugging
until you get white noise out of the speakers.

Running pulseaudio in a terminal is just a diagnostic thing. When
everything works you'll want it to start automatically. You could
probably run it from .bashrc, taking care to check for an already
running copy. Personally, I handle Pulseaudio entirely with my own
personal runit just for user slitt:

https://troubleshooters.com/linux/init/normal_user_runit.htm

It's actually pretty easy.

As far as Pipewire, I've never gotten it to work because I use Void
Linux, which is known to be a bitch to get Pipewire working on. But I'd
imagine you'd follow similar procedures to what you did with
Pulseaudio, and as far as I know Devuan is much easier to get Pipewire
working on than Void.

If you want to get down and dirty into the bowels of this stuff, I
wrote some stuff many years ago, and some of it is still relevant, but
*don't* use a ~/.asoundrc : ~/.asoundrc is almost never necessary these
days, and just causes trouble. The following URL shows my ancient (and
only partially accurate today) sound troubleshooting stuff:

https://troubleshooters.com/linux/sound/sound_troubleshooting.htm

SteveT

Steve Litt

http://444domains.com