Sound has disappeared. (Resolved with reservations)

[wayne1932]

process number 3122 is knotify4, and 3191 is kmix.

Did this procedure twice.  First time I apparently didn't say OK when I shut down avahi and removed check on boot.  But it made no difference, no sound until I killed the two processes. 

These look like legitimate processes to me.   ? ? ? ?

[wayne1932]

Just checked with avahi.org and the version in PCLOS  (0.6.25)_ is over a year old with two updates.  Supposedly bugfix and security updates.

My ignorance about avahi is probably showing but I don't see how it could be affecting this.

[wayne1932]

On my laptop now.   Different hardware, and no sound problems.  knotify4 and kmix are showing up as processes, and avahi is running. 

[wayne1932]

I wonder if one of the startup scripts has a developed a glitch that keeps things from working right? 

[djohnston]

My ignorance about avahi is probably showing but I don't see how it could be affecting this.

It was a hunch. Searching the forum for related problems brought up a post by a user with no sound who cured his problem by disabling avahi-daemon. Not all hardware is the same, so not all configurations and fixes are the same.

1) Well, okay. The offenders seem to be kmix and knotify. There's another mixer, installed by default, which is ncurses based, alsamixer. You can check out the settings by typing alsamixer in a terminal, or you can install alsamixergui package from Synaptic. In any case, check the settings and see if anything looks amiss. (The alsamixergui has a lot of sliders!)

2) Be sure you're fully updated. After that, in Synaptic, click the Search button, change the search function to "Name", instead of "Description and name", then enter mix. There will only be a few entries. See if you have extra sound mixers installed.

3) Sounds like you have a lot of sound playback programs installed. Have you checked the playback settings for each app to see whether you selected "oss" or "alsa" for playback?

4) Do you have JACK installed for a particular purpose, like musical instrument recording? If not, I don't see a purpose for having it installed, unless some package pulled it in as a dependency.

5) I don't have kmix installed, so I can't check settings, etc. But checking dependencies for it in Synaptic, it does require some pulseaudio packages as dependencies. I didn't see the pulseaudio-daemon, though.

P.S. Two of the toughest issues to solve in Linux can be sound and wireless. You're in good company.

[uncleV]

I have no problems with the sound on KDE. Using pulsaudio.

[wayne1932]

This morning I read your reply and have:


installed alsamixergui reset all levels to max and unmuted anything muted.

uninstalled alsamixergui.

found an item called sound scripts, marked and applied to reinstall.

uninstalled kmultimedia4 and along with it kmix

looked at jack, marked for uninstall and it wants to uninstall practically everything sound, so I backed off.

rebooted

Sound is back on startup

audacious seems to play OK

timidity plays OK

musescore seems OK

audacity:   with alsa marked as sound system, would play only a few seconds and quit.  with OSS /dev/dsp , it seems to play OK.  I've always had a problem with this, seems like audacity always needed OSS to work.  And I remember someone else having the "play a few seconds and quit problem"  I need to follow up on that. 

Now I have no mixers installed and no direct way to control volume.  No icon in tray. 

[wayne1932]

Installed and started kmix
Everything seems to be OK
Rebooted

I'm back where we started, icon in tray, levels seem to be OK except no sound. Same behavior starting/stopping alsa in PCC>SYSTEM>Services.

I think I had these programs (and more)  installed and operating in KDE3.5 with no problems.

Right clicked kmix in tray and quit.  went to PCC>SYSTEM>Services and stopped alsa with error message FAILED with only one PID.  This leads me to believe that knotify is the problem since I just quit kmix.

[wayne1932]

Now running 3.5

No problems

audacity is working with alsa:default

audacious plays just fine.

starting/stopping alsa in pcc>>services gives same error messages (two PID different #'s but then they are always different boot to reboot)as in 4.5, but doesn't affect sound.

I'm at my wits end.   Of course i was a short trip      

[wayne1932]

back in 4.5.

Definitely knotify4 that is causing problem.  Just kill kmix and knotify4 and restarted kmix.  Seems OK now. But it probably won't survive the reboot since knotify4 will be back.

After going back into 3.5  I'm amazed at the difference in speed of the system. 4.5 is just faster.  Of course there are many conflicting stories here. And I don't remember 3.5 being slow. 

[wayne1932]

I am  usually very eager to upgrade all via synaptic, but since this problem occurred I didn't want to add some more unknowns into the situation. Since I was about to give up and think about reinstalling, I took the plunge and upgraded.  Not much there, but one thing jumped out at me in the list of about 10 or 15 packages -- python notify.  I am not a programmer, I have no idea what language KDE is written with, but I went ahead with the upgrades.

And right now everything seems to be OK.  Will it survive? It has survived one reboot.   Only time will tell.  Was this a bug somewhere in some package and their interfaces that was fixed and applied directly to my situation?  I don't know.

Thanks to all,   

@UncleV, pulseaudio is still not installed.  what I have read about it indicates that to my hardware (ancient soundblaster!live), it is still a solution in search of a problem.   

[wayne1932]

I spoke too soon, it did not survive a second reboot.

[djohnston]

I spoke too soon, it did not survive a second reboot.

Looks like you have done more than your due diligence. I don't have KDE installed anywhere, so I can't really help with that desktop. Hopefully, someone else will come along and take a fresh look at this.

Here's something to try, from smurfslover, in another thread: "Try removing knotifyrc from ~/.kde4/share/config/ and restart kde4. Helped me once with a similar issue."

Also see this thread for the same problem as yours: http://www.pclinuxos.com/forum/index.php/topic,76493.0.html

In particular, see kjpetrie's post:

"Ctrl+Esc will bring up a table of processes. If you click the top of the PID column they will line up in numerical order so you can go down the list and find them. Then note the application name and user.

If the processes are owned by root, they were probably started  by boot scripts. Check the list of services in PCC. If they are owned by your normal user they were probably started by KDE. Check in SystemSettings and also the ~/.kde4/AutoStart folder."

[wayne1932]

Removed knotifyrc file and it worked thru one reboot.  Then it was back again blocking all sound.

then to top it all off, in getting into .kde4, I screwed up all my desktop customizations.  Spent any hour and half refreshing my memory on how to do all that, and it's still not like it was.

[wayne1932]

I had been happily playing some music via audacious last night while I browsed the internet and did other things. This was after the kill xxxx, start alsa, run kmix, exercise.   

This morning after bootup, no sound, same situation.  blocked by PID    xxxx, yyyy.  Since I had previously went thru the drill, I believed that knotify was the culprit.  So I got my sound working again, renamed /usr/bin/knotify to /usr/bin/kxxxxnotify.  and rebooted.  Still not sound on boot up.   The usual drill found PID XXXX only was running. So I knotify didn't start, as expected.  After kill XXXX, and starting also, I had sound again. 

Conclusion:  knotify and kmix somehow are not cooperating.   

Right now listening to music.