R3240 Sound

[John Jason Jordan]

Ubuntu-64 Dapper, clean install, not upgrade

Sound was working fine. It also worked fine in Breezy and before that
in Hoary. I never did anything to it. It just automatically always
worked. And it was autodetected and worked fine with this fresh install
of Dapper, too. But I have done something that screwed it up, and I
can't figure out how to unscrew it. Part of the reason for that is that
I am not sure exactly what I did that screwed it up.

In Breezy I had to run 32-bit chroot to get RealPlayer working. Also
used it for Adobe Reader 7.0 and I ran 32-bit Firefox in there as well,
so that I could get the Flash plugin working. Otherwise I ran
everything in the 64-bit world. As I explored the new Dapper I was
overjoyed to discover that 32-bit chroot is no longer needed for those
things. Sometimes I had to use force-architecture to get something to
install, but everything ran fine. I have Adobe Reader 7.08, RealPlayer
10, Firefox 1.52, Flash, and Java all working.

The only problem I had was getting the Adobe Reader plugin to work with
Firefox. It would run standalone fine, but if I went to a web page that
was a PDF, Firefox would insist that my only option was to download it.
Finally, I discovered that mozplugger would get it working. I had to
edit the mozpluggerrc file to do so, but afterwards everything was fine.

Shortly after congratulating myself that I had everything finally
configured and working well, I needed to go to the university. I took
the computer with me to test the wireless (still using ndiswrapper --
the new bcm43xx driver doesn't work well for me). When I logged in I
got an error message:

"User's $HOME/.dmrc file is being ignored. This prevents the default
session and language from being saved. File should be owned by user and
have 644 permissions. User's $HOME directory must be owned by user and
not writable by other users."

I could just click on OK and proceed to log in. I tried everything to
get rid of this error message, but to no avail.

Shorly after seeing this error message for the first time I went to
play a WAV file that someone had sent me. I got an error message that
no sound devices could be found, or that they were busy. After much
fiddling and asking questions I discovered that Firefox was the
culprit. Firefox had a death grip on the /dev/dsp file and wouldn't let
go; hence nothing else could use it. After closing Firefox I was able
to play the WAV file fine.

To eliminate the problem I looked at about:plugins in Firefox. It
listed mozplugger twice. Also mplayer 3.17 under two different
headings. I decided to uninstall them both. But, having done so, now
the sound does not work whether Firefox is running or not. Right after
booting with no applications launched, the sound is not working at all.
But the error message is different now. It says "No volume control
GStreamer plugins and/or devices found."

I looked in Synaptic and I have just about all the gstreamer
applications installed. I reinstalled them, but no luck. I also did
apt-get install for alsa-base, alsa-headers, and alsa-utils. They were
already installed with the latest version.

I also have a bare bones plain install of Dapper-64 on the same hard
drive to use as a rescue option. Today I finally used it to chmod
my /home/jjj folder to 644 as recommended by the login error message.
Then I rebooted the main installation and was not able to log in at
all! I rebooted the rescue installation and changed /home/jjj to 755.
That did it. Now I can log in, and the error message is gone. However,
the problem with sound remains. In other words, evidently the login
error message had nothing to do with the sound issues.

Does anyone have any ideas how to get sound working again? Or at least
some more commands I can run to troubleshoot it? Anything at all? I'm
getting pretty desperate.

[John Jason Jordan]

On Sun, 9 Jul 2006 17:45:23 -0700
John Jason Jordan <***@comcast.net> dijo:

Never mind. Took several hours, but I finally got it working again.

[Constantine 'Gus' Fantanas]

... Firefox had a death grip on the /dev/dsp file and wouldn't let
go; hence nothing else could use it. After closing Firefox I was able
to play the WAV file fine.

/dev/dsp? I don't run Ubuntu, but I would assume that Ubuntu utilizes
ALSA. '/dev/dsp' is a relic of the past (OSS, which is being
deprecated). Going through the Mozilla/Firefox startup scripts, as
installed, I see they invoke AOSS (ALSA's OSS emulation layer). Is ALSA
enbabled on your system? In the recent past I posted an extensive and
detailed account on how I managed to get ALSA working on my laptop,
including sound mixing from both 32 and 64-bit sapplications,
flawlessly. It may help to take a look at it. The only application that
kind of limps on my system is skype, but that, too, shares the sound card.

CF

[D. Hugh Redelmeier]

| From: John Jason Jordan <***@comcast.net>

| ... When I logged in I
| got an error message:
|
| "User's $HOME/.dmrc file is being ignored. This prevents the default
| session and language from being saved. File should be owned by user and
| have 644 permissions. User's $HOME directory must be owned by user and
| not writable by other users."

This is asking you the change the data file ~/.dmrc permissions to
allow you, the owner, to write it, and to allow everyone to read it.

Note: nobody now has permission to execute it (755 would add execute
permission for each of: use, group, and other).

| Today I finally used it to chmod
| my /home/jjj folder to 644 as recommended by the login error message.

Instead, you changed the permissions on the home directory. As a
directory, the execute permision bits are interpreted as controlling
whether an entry can be looked up within the directory (the main use
of a directory). You have said: nobody can look up things in this
directory. Not very useful.

| Then I rebooted the main installation and was not able to log in at
| all! I rebooted the rescue installation and changed /home/jjj to 755.
| That did it. Now I can log in, and the error message is gone.

755 is probably correct. The paranoid may prefer 750 (preventing
non-group members using the directory) or 700 (preventing group
members and fellow group members from using the directory). On a
notebook you probably don't give logins to folks you don't trust.