The Site With the Lamp

July 16, 2008

The webserver and the web browser aren't the only things that caused trouble. Alsa also played it's part. Sound on Fedora has always been one big headache. They kept making too many changes too often. We had to change from OSS to ALSA and then to Pulse Audio, a real pain in the ear. Apparently Debian is trying to outdo Fedora.

When I booted up The volume control icon at the top was a red x and when clicked on it told me that I had no GStreamer plugins installed or they were mis configured. After little bit of googling I found that adding myself to the audio group is the fix

That was too easy but debian had a suprise up it's sleeve. On mythtv there is no sound at all. It's dead silent and the mythfrontend output shows:

2008-07-02 12:38:11.269 Opening ALSA audio device 'default'.
ALSA lib pcm_dmix.c:864:(snd_pcm_dmix_open) unable to open slave

To fix this I ran alsa conf. Now I can hear what the idiots on the idiot box are saying but it's jerky. That's a separate mythtv issue that I don't have the energy to look into right now.