Ramblings

Well, I found a way to make it work, but I’m not sure why it broke to begin with. In /etc/asound.conf I simply changed the variable “defaults.pcm.device” from a value of 4, to one of 0. I chose zero only because the output of aplay -l indicated that device zero was my main device … I can’t get any audio out of 4 for whatever reason. Anyway, it’s working for now and I thought it smart to write this down for any others looking … and for me if I need it later.

So, I’ve finally run into my first real issue with Fedora Core 6. Don’t get me wrong, it has done me well for quite some time now, but it finally cried ‘Gotcha!’ the other day. In the course of a standard ‘yum update’, which, since it’s so simple, I tend to do pretty often, my ALSA packages got upgraded to 1.0.14-0.1.rc1.fc6. Not really paying attention too closely, a side effect of it normally being pretty painless, I went about my business for several more hours. This being a laptop, it got shutdown before heading to bed … and then started back up as I realized I’d like to watch some cartoons (Looney Tunes DVDs are great) while laying in bed trying to unwind.

Here’s where the story gets ugly … I didn’t have any sound when the machine came back up. No sound! How am I supposed to watch a DVD without sound? It seems that the few applications I have that still have OSS support will function if I manually set them to OSS and not ALSA, but those apps are in the minority by far these days.

So, it’s been a couple of days and there haven’t been any ‘whoops’ updates to ALSA, nor does there appear to be a flurry of activity on the Web. That leaves me in a bit of a quandry. I don’t know enough about yum, even after digesting the man pages, to try and roll back to an old version to see if that fixes it, nor do I really know enough about ALSA (once upon a time I did, but a lot has changed since then).

What really confuses me is that Fedora has a few utilities for managing sound and sound cards. Some of the ‘can you hear this sound’ checks pass just fine (when selecting a card for instance), but the user level properties that let me select ‘Auto Detect’, or a specific device all fail (unless I select OSS, but even then my apps can’t play sound).

Anyone out there know enough to help? I’m on an IBM Thinkpad R50e that uses the snd_intel8x0 module normally (and it’s currently loaded). Help?!?