On Fri, 16 Sep 2016 13:44:09 -0400 (EDT) Alan McConnell <a...@his.com> wrote:
> For some reason, my sound doesn't work on my new machine with its > present jessie install. It worked on my old machine(which had > jessie) and it works fine here on Windoze(I use youtube to play old > Bernie Sanders' speeches, or Mozart<g>). So what do I have to do? I > can't find alsa to install, and pulsesudio is already installed. > > Any and all suggestions/fixes appreciated. Please spare the > imprecations and chastisements! > Could I first suggest that you get hold of a recent version of Knoppix? Not just to solve this problem, but you seem to be at a point where you need a variety of help. It takes forever to boot up, but it's worth waiting for. It is based on Debian, and its particular selling point is its hardware driving abilities. It is based on unstable rather than a released Debian, but it is still usually possible to see how it achieves something and to transfer the knowledge to a standard Debian. I won't say that I've never seen hardware that beats it, but it doesn't happen often. More specifically, sound has always been a problem with Linux, not least because of the variety of systems involved, some of them optional, and the helpful instructions on the Net which cover many years and are mostly obsolete. I've no idea of the current state of the art, as I actually haven't had a sound problem for at least a year, so someone will correct any of my recollections which are incorrect. I also don't have a jessie system, but sound changes relatively slowly, and my wheezy and sid installations look fairly similar. Basically, there is a low-level driver for the hardware you have, and various layers of software on top of that. Probably the first job is to check that you are getting the hardware driver(s) installed, and the sound card(s) is/are available. I'm fairly sure pulseaudio is not yet standalone, it operates through alsa, and there are other tools to operate alsa directly. Rather than try unfamiliar software to check for cards, look in /proc/asound/cards (cat /proc/asound/cards). If you don't see the sound device you expect to see, you're probably not getting the driver installed. If you see more than one device, and the one you expect isn't the first in the list, I've reached the limit of my knowledge. I've solved that one before, but alsa configuration has changed since then, and systemd has arrived, and you need up-to-date instructions. If you see the expected device first in the list, then probably all is well with drivers. Check the audio mixer settings. Cards have different numbers of level adjustments, you may need more than one turned up to get internal sound. If you have a speaker icon on your desktop, right-click and run the audio mixer. If you don't, try alsamixer from the command line. If it can't find that, install the package alsamixergui and try again. When you can see that the right sliders are turned up (all of them if necessary) try speaker-test -c 2 from the command line, which should give you noise tests on the two main channels. If you get to that point, everything ought to work. If not, come back and we'll try to get further. -- Joe
