disappearing soundForum: Multimedia Topic: disappearing sound started by: nroza Posted by nroza on April 19 2006,11:29
Curious... I run the live cd (v2.3), bring up a firefox window, surf to a music site, click on a stream and up pops a media player. Not only that--- I can actually hear music. Mind you, this is the first Linux distro I've tried that has actually succeeded in playing music. At ALL."Awesome," I say to myself, and confidently install it to the hard drive. It reboots itself, I log in, launch firefox, click on a stream and... NOTHING. Not only that, a dialog box tells me that the media player cannot be found. What's up with that? -nr Posted by kendall14 on April 19 2006,23:28
May be a bad install. I personaly have had bad installing on a old computer with DSL. But I'm still a linux newb so don't take my word to full on that (even though I have had bad installs).
Posted by nroza on April 20 2006,00:04
Tell me about it. I can't for the life of me figure out the logic in a configuration that changes between the live cd and the install. I mean, shouldn't they be identical?Oh, well. I'll try you guys' distro again when it hits 3.0--maybe this "feature" will be ironed out by then. Peace! Posted by doobit on April 24 2006,17:23
Well, what kind of install? If you do the Frual install, then it acts exactly like the Live CD, but on the hard drive. I have done it many times with no problems, starting with DSL 0.9 to the present DSL-2.3
Posted by nroza on April 24 2006,19:01
Frugal install is the one I did. I was *really* impressed when I saw it install to the hard drive AT THE SAME TIME that it was running as a live cd. Damn. If I wasn't so in love with my music, I would have used it exclusively. But, Jesus, for power and speed, can you beat a distro that installs and runs concurrently??!!Anywho, to the topic at hand, my frugal install was not indentical to the live CD. By way of proof I offer precious little besides my account of clicking on *.pls links in firefox before and after the install in question. I have every confidence that DSL does its best to assure every frugal install is as faithful as possible to the CD. I also have every confidence that if I weren't so overworked/tired/ignorant/lazy I could track down the misconfiguration responsible, but alas, I am a college student. Posted by doobit on April 24 2006,19:22
Ben thar, dun that. Well, let's get started, and figure it out. My current configuration, that I am probably overly proud of, is a Frugal-GRUB install of DSL-2.3 on a compact disk that's running in a CF to IDE adapter hooked to a mini-itx mainboard inside a kid-sized metal lunchbox. This is a project that has really gotten the ideas flowing for me. The music works great on it, so maybe I can help. Posted by nroza on April 25 2006,03:51
Dude... For real?? You have the time and wherewithal to help a stranger with configuration issues? If so, then I have sorely misjudged open source forums as a whole. Okay, Okay... lets!The machine in question is a lovely, enormous Gateway G6-300 circa 1998. The chip is a slot Pentium 2 of heretofore unknown clockspeed. I am almost positive that this: < http://froogle.google.com/froogle....d&hl=en > is the motherboard. The sound is integrated on the mobo... I only mention this in case I have to go driver- or firmware-hunting. Looking forward to your reply! Posted by doobit on April 25 2006,17:38
Most of us who try to help are good guys as long as we don't get mistreated by our adoring public first. We do this for nothing, so don't push it. I almost missed your last post because it passed out of the cache before I even saw it. No doubt you would have been pissed if I never again responded, even though it wouldn't have been my fault. At least that's been the response of some others here lately.OK, The good thing is that your hardware is old. The Linux 2.4 kernel supports old hardware very well. The bad thing is...your hardware is old. There can be any number of things blocking the flow of a bit or byte here and there. For example: boards or cables that aren't fully seated anymore or have slightly corroded connectors, crud covering the laser diode in the CDROM drive, a servo in the drive with a rusty brush, jelly donuts crammed in the floppy, etc. As I said before, what goes on the hard drive in a frugal install *should be* the same as what's on the CDROM. If the sound works when you use the CD, then there's no reason it wouldn't work with the frugal HD install unless there was some quirky thing that burped when you were installing. On the same machine, if you boot with the CD, do you get the sound back? Posted by nroza on April 26 2006,04:23
I knew it was going to be a struggle with old hardware, but I didn't even consider some of the "corroded connector" stuff you mentioned. If I told you that I want to ressurrect this box as a dedicated streaming audio player with almost nothing else, would you tell me that I'm wasting my time?
Posted by doobit on April 26 2006,13:49
I think it may be worth it, but you will need to open the case and check everything. I always do that with older computers. I open it up, pull everything out and then put it back together. The other thing I was thinking is, if you have more than 128MB of RAM, and the CDROM is working OK, then you really don't even need to install it to the hard drive to make it work for your application. Just run it with the boot option dsl toram and away you go. Posted by underdog5004 on April 26 2006,20:53
You also may want to check your ide cables. I remember when I was installing dsl to a hard drive and it would install...but there were many errors. I re-downloaded the disk, reinstalled many times. Finally, I switched out hard-drives...nothing. So I checked the IDE cable to the HD...it looked like someone had pushed a thumbtack through 2 of the wires...needless to say, that was my problem. I swapped the IDE cable out, then installed (frugal). No problems since (With the kernel, at least...)
Posted by nroza on April 26 2006,21:18
Good advice, underdog. My hardware junkyard (read: parent's basement) runneth over with IDE ribbon cables. I'm sure I can find at least one that still works.Also, doobit, are you sure 128MB is enough? I'm going want a GUI and a player like Xine or VLC. I don't know if I can cram that plus the kernel into RAM. If I can run everything in RAM, can I also run it diskless, like a thin client? Posted by doobit on April 26 2006,22:11
The whole OS on my mini-itx is using 54.4 MB with Firefox running in Fluxbox. I just opened xmms to stream a radio station and now it's using 57.6 MB. In JWM it would work with less RAM. In JWM running streaming radio on xmms it's using 30.8 MB
Posted by nroza on April 27 2006,16:51
Awright... progress report:Rebooted the box, the live cd booted fine with no options. I'm able to browse with firefox and I can listen to my streams via the motherboard sound outputs. Rebooted, passed dsl toram option at the command line. Booted fine... sound still works! Next, I'm going to remove the IDE hard drive and see if I can't boot this bitch diskless /AND/ listen to my precious tunes. If I do get this diskless stream player going, does anyone have any suggestions regarding remote management of said player? Thanks in advance, nroza |