Arch Linux

10098

Member

Registered: 2010-05-11

Posts: 40

Website

Does ALSA depend on HAL?

Hello,
recently I decided to get rid of HAL and uninstalled it from my system. Later the same day I suddenly discovered that sound stopped working. I thought that it might be because of HAL, so I reinstalled it, stopped the alsa daemon, started the hal daemon, the started the alsa daemon again, but the sound did not come back. Later the same day I did a full system upgrade (which didn't seem to contain any kernel-related stuff, mostly xorg updates) and rebooted. I was surprised to see that the sound started working again.
So, my question is, what the hell was that?! :-) Does ALSA depend on HAL in any way? Or did the full upgrade bring my sound back? If yes, why did it stop working?

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:x

litemotiv

Forum Fellow

Registered: 2008-08-01

Posts: 5,026

Re: Does ALSA depend on HAL?

Alsa doesn't depend on hal, it must've been something else...

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ᶘ ᵒᴥᵒᶅ

Army

Member

Registered: 2007-12-07

Posts: 1,784

Re: Does ALSA depend on HAL?

Maybe you could compare the outputs of lsmod for both situations. Maybe there are some modules missing or something like that.

Other question, how do you "measure" that alsa doesn't work? Do you simply try to play something with some program? I'd recommend to start alsamixer in a terminal and see if it works. If so, the modules are up and running.

By the way, did you know that the alsa daemon simply launches alsactl store and restore? It only saves your currently set volumes when it stops and reloads them when it starts. So a restart of the alsa daemon is simply useless. That's a common mistake many arch users make.