I bought a new machine last week, the sound comes from an Intel HDA
audio device (CONFIG_SND_HDA_INTEL) which provides *both* HDMI and
analogue outputs. I don't use pulse and have no wish to.
aplay -l shows:
**** List of PLAYBACK Hardware Devices ****
card 0: HDMI [HDA ATI HDMI], device 3: HDMI 0 [HDMI 0]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 1: Generic [HD-Audio Generic], device 0: ALC887-VD Analog
[ALC887-VD Analog]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 1: Generic [HD-Audio Generic], device 1: ALC887-VD Digital
[ALC887-VD Digital]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
Note that card 0 is HDMI, so the regular sound (jack to my amp) was
silent. That has been fixed by creating ~/.asoundrc (it can also go
in /etc/asound.conf but I haven't tested that) with :
# card 0 is the hdmi
pcm.!default {
type hw
card 1
}
ctl.!default {
type hw
card 1
}
In alsamixer I can move to the second card [F6 before creating
asoundrc] and unmute it. The combination allowed alsamixer to
control the volume - which is nice, but takes up a terminal and isn't
mouse-friendly.
I've been using gvolwheel, but it came up muted (level set to 0 -
it doesn't use a 'mute' control) and didn't alter the volume no
matter where it was set - e.g. alsamixer and vlc would play at their
expected volumes whether the gvolwheel slider was set to 0, 100, or
anywhere else.
Eventually I discovered that gvolwheel was using the old oss
/dev/mixer which presumably only finds the first sound card. Then
I remembered that I'd done that [ --enable-oss in configuring
gvolwheel ] because otherwise, on my previous machines, it wouldn't
appear until after I'd used alsamixer. That made it match the old
gtk2 version of gvolwheel which was oss-only.
So, I rebuilt gvolwheel to use alsa : strace now showed it was
trying to open /dev/snd/controlC1 - and apparently succeeding - but
still reporting "Error opening mixer device".
I thought I'd managed to fix it by running 'alsactl init', but I
was wrong. After a lot more experimentation I found that I need to
run "alsactl store" to make it work. That is what the BLFS alsa
bootscript runs on _shutdown_. NB invoking alsamixer didn't fix it
on this machine.
This makes me feel very confused! Early days, but I guess I can
test this (using alsa in gvolwheel) on the other machines, with a
hacked-up script to run alsactl store. But it seems back-to-front.
I thought about running alsactl, as a user, from .xinitrc but I
can't run 'store' : Cannot open /var/lib/alsa/asound.state for
writing: Permission denied
So, I suppose I ought to change the gvolwheel build. But it then
needs a bootscript to run alsactl store at startup (otherwise the
gvolwheel icon doesn't appear). Would it be sensible to add that
to the bootscripts, called e.g. "gvolwheel", or is there a better
solution ?
And would it be worth me documenting the use of card 1 in the alsa
section of the book ?
ĸen
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