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

Peter,

Thanks for the detailed response.

What I have found is:

$ ps aux | grep pulse

Just shows the above command no pulseaudio service running.

$ pactl list-sinks

Says it is an invalid command option

$ Speaker-test

I hear nothing through the speakers

$ aptitude search alsa | grep pulse

Gives me no packages.

Kali 2.0 is supposed to have been build on top of debian jesse, but it seems like a lot of audio packages are 
missing in the mate variant at least.

I am going to list all packages installed in the gnome variant and the mate variant and compare the packages 
to see what is different because obviously something is drastically different in the pulseaudio area.
-----Original Message-----
From: Peter Vágner [mailto:pvdeejay gmail com] 
Sent: Thursday, August 13, 2015 11:58 PM
To: Don Raikes; B. Henry; orca-list gnome org
Subject: Re: [orca-list] dealing with gnome-shell on new system

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.
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