Re: [orca-list] dealing with gnome-shell on new system

[Peter Vágner <pvdeejay gmail com>]

Hello,
I am not sure how to properly explain your situation with espeak 
printing a lot of errors so I'll just start by trying to answer previous 
message and from there I'll eventually start speculating on what might 
be going on.

pacmd list
lists all pulseaudio modules. So if this command gives you nothing then 
verry likelly pulse audio is not running.
If you like you can verify it by executing
ps aux | grep pulse
you should get output indicating your user is running pulseaudio. Also 
your login manager might keep running pulseaudio and I think that should 
not be a problem.

If you would like to check output devices pulseaudio can play audio 
through then you can execute
pactl list-sinks

I guess you have entered commands correctly when executing through the 
terminal and you have just made a typo when writing the email. So I have 
included this just to make sure we can agree on what is happening.

Instead of trying espeak can you also try running some apps from 
alsa-utils to verify this is really a driver issue you are experiencing?
E.G. try running
speaker-test
This should start generating white noyse and you can stop it by pressing 
ctrl+c. If pulseaudio is not running it uses alsa directly, if 
pulseaudio is running then it uses pulseaudio alsa support to handle so 
it should play regardless. Actually this is just to make absolutelly 
sure this is not eSpeak or portaudio issue on your system. Originally I 
was not going to explain a lot of complicated things but I should note 
here that for alsa support eSpeak uses portaudio.

And now the difficult part. I really can't make up my mind to work out 
what's going on. By default eSpeak is built in a way so it tries to use 
pulseaudio first and then it tries to use alsa. However guessing from 
your output it only uses alsa at this point. So the most logical 
assumption here is that on this distro eSpeak build might deviate a bit 
from the default. I don't know why anyone might change that though so 
it's where I'm starting to be unsure and this is just hit and miss 
situation.
Continuing further with my assumption since eSpeak attempts to use alsa, 
pulse audio is running and you are getting loads of errors I think 
pulseaudio alsa support is not installed. On Arch linux this is packaged 
as pulseaudio-alsa and I guess it may be similar in debian and its 
derivatives. Please try to check if you do have pulseaudio-alsa installed.

To further explain this pulseaudio vs alsa relationship. Alsa is defacto 
standard platform when it comes to supporting sound hardware on linux 
and friends. Alsa includes kernel modules which interface directly to 
the hardware. It also includes user space tools and libraries. These 
libraries were only option to provide sound support to applications 
before pulseaudio has been introduced. So putting pulseaudio, oss and 
other similar libraries where the functionality might overlap aside we 
do have a situation that user space app uses alsa libraries to talk to 
kernel modules handling the hardware devices (device driver). As 
pulseaudio is added into the mix trying to provide unified consistent 
interface on top of this we do have modern apps also reffered to as 
pulseaudio clients playing sound through pulseaudio, pulseaudio in turn 
uses alsa and alsa communicates with its kernel modules controlling the 
hardware devices. Now there are loads of apps supporting pulse audio 
directly. However there are still a few apps which are not supporting 
pulseaudio or there might be corner case configuration like we are 
getting into where an application is trying to use alsa API while 
pulseaudio is running. So pulseaudio has an alsa emulation support 
available that can make alsa aware apps to play sound while pulseaudio 
is blocking direct access to hardware. Hopefully I haven't put this in a 
more complicated terms than I have intended. I think this might really 
be usefull for us to have at least basic understanding of all this as we 
are relying exclusivelly on this chain to be working.

Sorry for the long message which I am not sure is helpfull enough in 
your situation.

Greetings

Peter

On 14.08.2015 at 06:12 Don Raikes wrote:
> When I try:
>
> Espeak hello
>
> I get the following messages:
> ALSA lib setup.c:548:(add_elem) Cannot obtain info for CTL elem (MIXER,'AC97 2ch->4ch Copy Switch',0,0,0): No 
> such file or directory
> ALSA lib pcm.c:2239:(snd_pcm_open_noupdate) Unknown PCM cards.pcm.center_lfe
> ALSA lib pcm.c:2239:(snd_pcm_open_noupdate) Unknown PCM cards.pcm.side
> ALSA lib pcm.c:2239:(snd_pcm_open_noupdate) Unknown PCM cards.pcm.surround21
> ALSA lib pcm.c:2239:(snd_pcm_open_noupdate) Unknown PCM cards.pcm.surround21
> ALSA lib setup.c:548:(add_elem) Cannot obtain info for CTL elem (MIXER,'AC97 2ch->4ch Copy Switch',0,0,0): No 
> such file or directory
> ALSA lib pcm.c:2239:(snd_pcm_open_noupdate) Unknown PCM cards.pcm.surround41
> ALSA lib pcm.c:2239:(snd_pcm_open_noupdate) Unknown PCM cards.pcm.surround50
> ALSA lib pcm.c:2239:(snd_pcm_open_noupdate) Unknown PCM cards.pcm.surround51
> ALSA lib pcm.c:2239:(snd_pcm_open_noupdate) Unknown PCM cards.pcm.surround71
> ALSA lib setup.c:548:(add_elem) Cannot obtain info for CTL elem (PCM,'IEC958 Playback PCM Stream',0,0,0): No 
> such file or directory
> ALSA lib setup.c:548:(add_elem) Cannot obtain info for CTL elem (PCM,'IEC958 Playback PCM Stream',0,0,0): No 
> such file or directory
> ALSA lib setup.c:548:(add_elem) Cannot obtain info for CTL elem (PCM,'IEC958 Playback PCM Stream',0,0,0): No 
> such file or directory
> ALSA lib pcm.c:2239:(snd_pcm_open_noupdate) Unknown PCM cards.pcm.hdmi
> ALSA lib pcm.c:2239:(snd_pcm_open_noupdate) Unknown PCM cards.pcm.hdmi
> ALSA lib pcm.c:2239:(snd_pcm_open_noupdate) Unknown PCM cards.pcm.modem
> ALSA lib pcm.c:2239:(snd_pcm_open_noupdate) Unknown PCM cards.pcm.modem
> ALSA lib pcm.c:2239:(snd_pcm_open_noupdate) Unknown PCM cards.pcm.phoneline
> ALSA lib pcm.c:2239:(snd_pcm_open_noupdate) Unknown PCM cards.pcm.phoneline
> ALSA lib pulse.c:243:(pulse_connect) PulseAudio: Unable to connect: Connection refused
>
> ALSA lib pulse.c:243:(pulse_connect) PulseAudio: Unable to connect: Connection refused
>
> Cannot connect to server socket err = No such file or directory
> Cannot connect to server request channel
> jack server is not running or cannot be started
>
> I still think that I just don't have a sound driver loaded.
> -----Original Message-----
> From: B. Henry [mailto:burt1iband gmail com]
> Sent: Thursday, August 13, 2015 4:29 PM
> To: Don Raikes; orca-list gnome org
> Subject: Re: [orca-list] dealing with gnome-shell on new system
>
> I have had trouble running PA on some hardware over the last several months, but not in a regular manner that 
> could be predicted. The only solution I found was to remove the user's pulse directory from  ~/.config and 
> reboot. On one machine I set up for a friend of a friend this happened so regularly that I made a script to 
> replace the pulse directory with a backup of aworking configuration that had the sound adjusted to the user's 
> liking. This was the only machine where  things muted so often, everything was muted and did not respond to 
> media keys  nor alsamixer dommands to be clear.
> lllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllll