No working sound in Debian Lenny - need help.

[khelben1979]

Yesterday and today I have been sitting with Debian Lenny and right now I still have no working sound in this Debian Lenny system. The sound has been detected and can be used by different applications, but I get no sound out in the speakers.

At the present I have tried everything I can think of, but still.. No sound. (I've tried AlsaConf and AlsaMixer....)
Any suggestions? Should I post the output from the dmesg tool?

[JivanAmara]

Yesterday and today I have been sitting with Debian Lenny and right now I still have no working sound in this Debian Lenny system. The sound has been detected and can be used by different applications, but I get no sound out in the speakers.

At the present I have tried everything I can think of, but still.. No sound. (I've tried AlsaConf and AlsaMixer....)
Any suggestions? Should I post the output from the dmesg tool?

Does your sound work if you run a sound app as root?
If so, add yourself to the 'audio' group and you should be set.

[curaga]

Alsamixer is a tough beast; sometimes you won't get sound for the weirdest of reasons (having, say, line unmuted, or some weirdly named input/output muted). If you play with it long enough, you're bound to find a working conf.

[khelben1979]

I solved the problem.

Each time the updater program changes the kernel to a new one (small update) the ALSA sound system becomes unusable. And to solve the problem I just compiled up the source of the ALSA sound system and everything worked again.

I need to do this everytime a new kernel gets into the system. This doesn't feel very high tech to me to be forced to do this on an Debian system today 2008, but I haven't found any other solution to this problem.

[JivanAmara]

Are you running etch or lenny?

[khelben1979]

I'm using Etch myself. Waiting until Lenny is finished before I'm going for the upgrade.

Lenny was installed on my brothers laptop. He's got a much more modern laptop then I have, so Etch wasn't a good choice for him.

[Kano]

Just install a newer kernel, that has usually a newer alsa. Just compare:

cat /proc/asound/version