I had been fighting for a very long time with pulseaudio on Unity Linux 2010…it just didn’t seem to work for me. There were problems with having to mute and unmute the external amplifier channel in alsamixer in order to get sound to work. On some boots there was no sound and on others, sound was fine. When I finally installed TinyMe 2010 RC last week, I disabled pulseaudio all together to get the sound working with ALSA only.
Then the worst thing that could possibly happen on my Gateway M250 happened…ALSA stopped working and there was no sound. I started pulseaudio back up to no avail…no matter what I did, nothing worked to get sound up and running.
It was about the time I wanted to carve the sound pieces out of my laptop and throw them across the room that I decided to give everything I tried in the past one more try.
I fixed it…and I was pretty amazed that the solution was as easy as it was having spent weeks upon weeks fighting the pulseaudio issue. I can only surmise that I made a typo in the module that I needed to blacklist. After this arduous journey, it came down to blacklisting the modem sound card to make things work.
To do this on Mandriva and Unity Linux you’ll need to blacklist the following module: snd_intel8x0m. Notice the ‘m’ on the end of the standard module snd_intel8x0 for the ICH6 sound card.
You can do this by editing the following file as root in your favorite text editor: /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-compat
Add the following line anywhere in this file:
blacklist snd_intel8x0m
After that, you can reboot to make sure the module is blacklisted. I know there are more elegant ways to load and unload kernel modules but this is the easiest way to get the job done for new users. Subsequent reboots resulted in still having sounds. Thankfully, I didn’t have to rip my laptop apart in a quest to throw the sound portions. I sure hope this helps others out!
excellent post. very informative!