Arch Linux

Ghiofish

Member

Registered: 2009-11-11

Posts: 3

Sound Unexpectedly Broken

I'm very happy with my new Arch Linux installation, and everything was going fine until yesterday. Currently, I have no sound whatsoever when using Arch. I'm using ALSA on ArchLinux 64-bit with the ASUS Xonar D2X soundcard- however I don't think this is a hardware issue because everything still works fine in Windows and neither integrated or discreet sound seem to work in Arch.

When I login, KDE gives me a message like "[my sound card driver (I think it's called virtuoso something)] does not work, falling back to default." I've tried screwing around with everything in System Settings -> Multimedia, but to no avail. Any idea what could be wrong?

Thanks in advance for any help you may be able to provide.

Last edited by Ghiofish (2009-11-11 20:59:22)

brianhanna

Member

Registered: 2009-10-30

Posts: 157

Re: Sound Unexpectedly Broken

Looks like I'm having the same problem after upgrading today.  I'm also using KDE.

Ghiofish

Member

Registered: 2009-11-11

Posts: 3

Re: Sound Unexpectedly Broken

Also, I forgot to mention that Kmix won't start up. I've tried running it with several different methods, but it just appears in the taskbar and then disappears after a while.

brianhanna

Member

Registered: 2009-10-30

Posts: 157

Re: Sound Unexpectedly Broken

I think I found the problem.  It's with HAL and here's a post on it http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=84471 .

Luckily the fix is easy.  Just add your user to the audio group (as root) -- `gpasswd -a username audio`  and restart.  At least that fixed it for me.

Last edited by brianhanna (2009-11-11 23:33:18)

Ghiofish

Member

Registered: 2009-11-11

Posts: 3

Re: Sound Unexpectedly Broken

That's really odd because I know for a fact that I've been a member of the audio group since I installed Arch. My audio is now also working, but only after trying a hack recommended on the unofficial ALSA wiki. I gave myself permssion to access the audio device (/dev/something) with chmod. I guess it's possible that updating a certain package removed us from the audio group, I dunno. Anyway, I'm just happy my sound is working.