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

[Peter Vágner <pvdeejay gmail com>]

Hello,
I guess mate does not depend on pulseaudio as hard as gnome does so 
perhaps building the image without pulseaudio seemed to be the preffered 
choice for kali linux creators.
In this case I would just try to make sure the sound is working.
You may try using alsa-mixer and a mixer apps from the alsa-utils 
package to try to unmute your sound devices and set it to a suitable 
volume level. Sometimes depending on your soundcard in order to make 
analog outputs working you should mute digital outputs. Unfortunatelly I 
am not proficient with these tools so I can't give you a detailed howto 
on how to operate these alsa utilities. If you can't figure it out then 
I may try plaing with it here in a vm just to see what's going on.
If you will get sound working through alsa you can then configure 
speech-dispatcher to use alsa directly.


Greetings

Peter

On 14.08.2015 at 21:25 Don Raikes wrote:
> 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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> > llllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllll
> > llllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllll
> > l