I'm the one who has been asking questions about getting an old Dell Dimension mother board with an on-board CS4236 sound card to work again after upgrading to wheezy.
For years, I have had pulseaudio and alsa on this system and have also seen what I will describe as weirdness which makes me wonder what is really working and what is not. If you do ps ax |grep pulseaudio |grep -v grep to look for any pulseaudio processes, one does find a process for pulseaudio and it is configured for per-user sessions. You can reportedly play multiple audio sources with pulseaudio but I have never been able to play more than one source at a time with further attempts to play something resulting in a "device busy" error which is normally not a problem but it's obviously not coming from pulseaudio. This system also has no X-windows clients and thus is a command-line-only system but I constantly see the following message in syslog: wb5agz pulseaudio[20877]: [pulseaudio] server-lookup.c: Unable to contact D-Bus: org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.Not Supported: Unable to autolaunch a dbus-daemon without a $DISPLAY for X11 This looks pretty sick to me but it could be that the daemon is working but just can't shout out to anyone which is kind of dumb since an error message looks just as informative on a console as it does in a GUI. The only reason I put pulseaudio on here was way back when I was running lenny and had no /dev/dsp. Someone suggested installing pulseaudio. I did. /dev/dsp came back and life marched on. Generally, sound got easier and better with upgrades but the upgrade to wheezy turned back the clock and sound is broken for all practical purposes. There were actually two sound cards, the CS4236 on the mother board plus an AWE64 Gold which behaves like a SBLive board in Linux. No wave tables or other special effects but recording and playback are fine. After the wheezy upgrade, both sound cards went poof and one would never know they were there except the CS4236 shows up in dmesg as a plug-and-play card. The SBLive does a better job of hiding but manages to sometimes be able to kill the Ethernet interface probably by fighting over the same interrupt. a Soundblaster Digi which is a fancy USB card that had worked fairly well both recording and playing under squeeze now limps along with only playback of the left and right channels and absolutely nothing else. Nothing regarding sound is better on this system and many things that have worked flawlessly for over ten years such as the ability to autodetect the on-board sound card and install a /dev/dsp device are all gone. I have an ace in the hole in that I had an extra boot drive so I used dd to copy the original squeeze drive to the new soon-to-be wheezy drive. After running the upgrade and loosing all the sound, I can simply slip the squeeze drive back in and there should be music again but support for squeeze is running out soon and, as a retired worker in network operations, I know that one of the best ways to be safe on the internet is to keep your computer's OS up to date. The rifraf out there will at least have a little more trouble cracking your system if it is current than they will if it is several revisions behind and all the bad guys know how to break in. Except for the sound, everything else seems to be in order though it is, of course, hard to tell for sure until you try to do something and now you can't when you could before the upgrade. Legacy code is not necessarily bad and one would hope that new code builds on the legacy as opposed to just whacking off stuff that used to work and replacing it with something that instantly renders a whole table full of equipment useless. One expects things like that from purely commercial software but one of the neat things about Linux is that it isn't or at least wasn't quite as picky about hardware. Oh well, I am dangerously close to ranting so let's stop and see what others say. Mainly, if there is a better way to do Linux sound, I'm all ears. The silence is deafening. Martin McCormick -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: https://lists.debian.org/20150715194414.359c822...@server1.shellworld.net