Viraj's Weblog

Awhile ago I had setup a Ubuntu Linux system for my mom to use. There were some issues with sound not working that I never really looked into. This morning I decided to look more into it.

Basically, the problem was that sound was not working. Looking at an 'lsmod' showed a snd-cmipci module loaded which I found out was the driver for my card (Crystal Media 8738). So I started checking log messages for any device not found messages but didn't find any. Sound applications, like Real Player, would just hang when they started. Doing an strace on them revealed them trying to open /dev/audio, /dev/dsp, or /dev/snd/pcmSomeHexCrap and just locking on that. Then I tried something simple:

echo a > /dev/audio

This should return immediately with some garbage sound sent to the device. But it didn't, and just hung.I thought it might be an IRQ or some sort of hardware conflict. I found on google mention of upgrading to a new ALSA driver (ALSA is what Ubuntu uses). So I downloaded the Alsa source, which then wanted a configured Linux kernel source. Ubuntu does not include this, and I didn't want to be fucking recompiling the kernel for sound.

So I said forget upgrading, I'll see if it's another problem. Just by chance, I SSH'ed remotely into the box and didn't login on the console. I tried the same echo command above and it worked. Then I tried aplay to play a sound and it worked. At this point sound was working when I didn't login to X. So some sound daemon X is starting is screwing things up. That narrowed it down.

I logged in on X and started looking at the lsof output of daemons that sound like they have something to do with sound . I found esd had /dev/dsp open, and a 'killall esd' later I was able to play sounds just fine. I ended up disabling the 'sound server' via System-Preferences-Sound as explained here, which said goodbye to esd. Real Player was happy now.

A Google search comes up with mention of using '-as 2' to esd which might help. I honestly don't give a shit. This just reinforces to me the pathetic state of sound on Linux.