Alsactl and FC4 bootup conflict

[Chris Rouch]

On 2/16/06, Anne Wilson <cannewilson at tiscali.co.uk> wrote:
> Yesterday I solved the problem of missing sound on this workstation and stored
> the settings (Audigy 1 soundcard).  I put 'alsactl restore'
> into /etc/rc.d/rc.local.  This morning when I booted up there was no sound.
>
> Running alsamixer showed that the settings had been restored.  I ran
> system-config-soundcard and found that I could only get white noise and a
> faint sound - which was where I started from yesterday.  Experimentation
> quickly found that one setting, Audigy Analog/Digital Output Jack, was being
> switched on every time I ran the test sound.  It must be off, for sound to
> work properly.
>
> I suspect that what is happening at boot-time is that alsactl is being
> restored, but then Audigy Analog/Digital Output Jack is being switched back
> on when the start-up sound should occur.  I don't know whether this is a FC
> problem or a KDE one.
>

You could confirm this by putting

aplay /path/to/something.wav

in /etc/rc.local and see if you hear anything before you login.

There's some funky stuff in /etc/modprobe.conf which tries to save the
current state whenever the sound module is unloaded, so it could be
that a broken state is being saved instead of a working one. I've
removed this, as I prefer to restore to a "known good" state, rather
than the last one I was using.

Chris