with pulse, it's silent; without sound works

Posted Aug 27, 2010 9:46 UTC (Fri) by buchanmilne (guest, #42315)
In reply to: with pulse, it's silent; without sound works by sebas
Parent article: Systemd and Fedora 14

Luckily, since I switched to a distro that doesn't mandate the use of pulseaudio (openSUSE), my sound problems are simply *gone*.

So, now you aren't sure if it is different (newer/older) snd_hda_intel drivers, or PA.

On a distribution (Mandriva) which defaulted to PA, but allows very easy switching to straight ALSA, I found (about a year ago) by switching to ALSA that the problems I had with sound input on my laptop were not due to PA but the snd_hda_intel driver needing some tweaks for my hardware (in 2.6.27). Some point releases of 2.6.27 fixed and subsequently broke it again. In more recent kernels (2.6.31 and later) I haven't had these problems (although the mic did sometimes stop working after suspend, unloading and reloading snd_hda_intel fixed it - but I haven't seen this problem on 2.6.33 or later). Immediately after having isolated the problem as being the driver, I switched back to PA, and really don't have any issues (on 4 machines, including my media player which has 5.1 via SPDIF enabled from the XBMC settings).

My experience is as simple as: Without pulse it works, with pulse it doesn't

No, technically, your experience was "On one distro it didn't work, on the other it did, the one where it didn't work used PA, the one where it worked didn't", with undefined definitions of "it" and "work", and no clear identification of the cause besides association.