9:31 pm April 24th, 2008 by wkallander

I’ve had intermittent problems with my sound card in Fedora 7, since the beginning. Come to find out, it was my frigging webcam instead, or so I believe at this point.

So, what am I going on about?

Every so often (not every time), I boot up Fedora, and it can’t find the sound card device. My first thought was that the sound card was bad, as the card was an old Creative SoundBlaster - a pull from a much older box I had previously. Thinking that the card was the problem, I decided to chuck the card just use the onboard sound motherboard (an Asus M2N-SLI with integrated sound) device instead.

The problem went away, so naturally, I declared success and moved on. A few days later, the sound disappears again! I rebooted, and, Viola, it’s back! Spooooky.

A few more days, and it bites me again. This time I wanted to get to the bottom of things.

The problem is immediately apparent of you have the volume adjuster applet installed in a gnome panel (I’m sure there’s an equivalent for KDE). The Volume Adjuster button shows up with an X through it, as though it were muted, and when launching into the Volume Control, the only thing that shows up is a microphone. Attempting to change the device gives you no options… Curiouser and curiouser…

So, at this point, I am pretty sure the kernel is not seeing the device properly. My suspicions are comfirmed by grepping for errors in dmesg, which turns up this gem:

cannot find the slot for index 0 (range 0-0)
hda-intel: Error creating card!
HDA Intel: probe of 0000:00:0e.1 failed with error -12

So, at this point, I looked up that error, and discovered some rather unhelpful advice that one has to run alsaconf at every boot when this occurs… No, thank you.

One interesting aspect about the motherboard sound is that it is actually run off of the USB controller. So, I thought, what if it’s a conflict with another sound device?

The scanner? Probably not.
The KVM switch? Unlikely.
The flash drive? Also unlikely.
The webcam? Now why would…? Oh, wait, there’s a mike in there!

I unplugged the webcam, and it boots up with the sound enabled. I really don’t have any reason to have a webcam anyway, let’s wait and see if leaving it unplugged fixes this little annoyance once and for all.

I guess I could always try the alsaconf every time instead… Ugh.

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