Viraj's Weblog

As mentioned, I recently installed Debian Testing, aka sarge, on a home PC. It had defaulted to the GNOME desktop, and I had noticed that the volume applet was not working properly. I attributed this to Debian not detecting my soundcard at install, and didn't bother with it as I don't have much need for sound.

I decided this morning to see how difficult it was to get sound working. Doing an lsmod showed an emu10k1 module loaded. It actually did detect my soundcard! But why was the GNOME volume applet not working? It was always going back to zero volume level, and trying to start the mixer resulted in some device not found error. Well is sound actually working?

cat /bin/ls > /dev/audio

Ahh, yes I actually heard the sweet sound of /bin/ls. xmms even works, but rhythmbox, which is the default player for certain files, had a similar complaint about my device not being found.

Now I wanted to find out where my emu10k1 module was configured to load. On Red Hat systems, I would see this in /etc/modules.conf, but I didn't find it in the file on Debian. I searched all of /etc:

grep -ril emu10 /etc

and still came up with nothing. Wtf? Is Debian storing system configuration elsewhere? I decided to forget about that and look into the real problem: GNOME audio apps not working.

After some Googling, I saw some mention on this page that I needed to create a /dev/sound/mixer the same as /dev/mixer. Well that didn't do shit. Maybe it's trying to open something else. I brought out good old strace on the volume app:

strace -o /tmp/blah gnome-volume-control

I looked for any /dev opens or stats, hoping to see it trying to find a missing mixer device. I saw it trying to open /dev/snd/control* and /dev/aload* devices. I remember seeing something about ALSA and these devices. Well I am not using ALSA, and don't really see a need to install it. I just want the volume control working damnit.

About an hour more of searching I finally came across a bug report from someone who went through my pain, almost exactly to the tee. From that bug I saw mention of gstreamer-properties. I have no idea what this is used for, but after running it showed it was configured for ALSA sound output and input. There was no other selection.

The bug mentioned the gstreamer0.8-oss package needing to be installed. Started up Synaptic, installed the package, and gstreamer-properties now has an OSS selection. OSS is the standard Linux sound driver. After selecting that and restarting GNOME, my volume, mixer, and rhythmbox worked fine. strace on the volume app show it correctly opening /dev/mixer and other devices. It turns out the main problem was a result of a bug in the new Debian installer. What a pain!

Lesson learned, Debian still has a ways to go for a usable desktop. I still don't know where my sound module is being loaded from...

Update: Digging around for sound in /etc led me to a /etc/discover.conf. It turns out discover is like kudzu on Red Hat, and does hardware detection. So now I know how my emu10k1 module is being loaded.