Hey! I did something stupid in Linux, and now I need your help.

Renzatic on 2/10/2013 at 01:23

I come to you now, hanging my head in shame, because I can't troubleshoot Linux nearly as well as I can Windows.

So here's the deal. I have my PS3 routed through my sound cards line-in port for sound. It used to work fine, but recently I started noticing a good bit of lag between the action onscreen and the accompanying sound. So I did what any good Linux dork would do, I jumped on Google and searched for an answer to my question.

...and then I did the worst thing a Linux noob could do: I listened to the posted advice of an overly opinionated, high strung neckbeard. End result, I ended up uninstall Pulse Audio to install ALSA, realized that ALSA didn't work for my line-in for reasons unknown, tried reinstalling Pulse, and now? Now I don't have sound. Some way, some how, I've broke my entire sound subsystem. I don't even have my little speaker volume doohickey on my taskbar, which is the most tragic thing of all.

Now I'm using ElementaryOS, which is based on Ubuntu 12.04. It's got basically the same underpinnings as it, so just about anything that works in Ubuntu will work here. So my question is, how can I reinstall Pulse and Alsa to factory defaults without reinstalling the entire OS?

Simple question, right?

jay pettitt on 2/10/2013 at 12:07

Hell if I know. But you've tried using the package manager to uninstall/reinstall them right?

p.s. what's Elementary like?

Al_B on 2/10/2013 at 18:55

I'm not an expert at sound systems in Linux but I thought that Pulse Audio sat on top of ALSA so it's not an either / or situation. It would be useful to know exactly what you did (or which web page you followed) but I'd recommend checking that your sound isn't muted by running alsamixer from a terminal window or installing qasmixer and running that. If that works then you should be able to install Pulse Audio again with "sudo apt-get install pulseaudio" and restarting Linux. If you enable device selection in qasmixer from the View menu then you should be able to see if it can connect to your Pulse Audio mixer or not.

Renzatic on 2/10/2013 at 19:43

(http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1313253) These are the instructions I used to replace Pulse with Alsa.

I figured I could just repeat the process in reverse if I had problems, but...nope. I'm pretty much stuck without sound. Also, I should add that I didn't notice the instructions were for Karmic until after I made the first big changes.

What's strange is Synaptics still shows I have Pulse and ALSA installed, and I can choose both from inside of gstreamer-properties, but it doesn't seem to be, for lack of a better word, hooked into the OS. This is why I wanted to find a way to wipe it all, and reinstall it all from scratch. Just do it all in one big brute force push so it'll grab whatever I need that I'm missing.

...though I should add that when I run gstreamer, (https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/3018396/SoundProblems.png) it does give me a few missing plugin errors. I might apt-get them, reboot, and see if that gets me running.

Oh, and Jay, ElementaryOS is excellent all around. It's very, very OSX like, but has enough of its own tweaks going on with it so it doesn't feel like a straight up clone. Just...very inspired by. It's also fast as hell. It almost felt like I had it natively installed when I ran it off of USB. I recommend giving it a try if you've got a spare thumbdrive lying around.

edit: no go. It looks like I lost some esound libraries, which I've since installed, but it's not hooking itself into the OS. I'm starting to get to the point where I feel that backing up my files and reinstalling the OS is the better option.

Blah. I should've backed up my settings before making any big changes.

Al_B on 2/10/2013 at 23:41

Hmmm... I went through the same process as an experiment in Elementary and got to largely the same point. However, I was able to get the volume indicator and sound back with:

sudo apt-get install pulseaudio gstreamer0.10-pulseaudio libpulsedsp pulseaudio-utils rtkit indicator-sound

No guarantees but it might be worth a shot if you haven't already wiped your system. I used the information in /var/log/dpkg.log to find what had been removed as a consequence of removing pulseaudio in the first place which is why it doesn't appear to be as simple as just doing the steps in reverse.

Renzatic on 2/10/2013 at 23:57

I think that did it. Some way, some how, I managed to remove my sound indicator. Just it, nothing else. I found out that somehow a good deal my various input and output settings were muted when I rebooted and had access to the indicator. I turned those up, and now I've got sound.

...don't ask me how it happened, but we're good. Thanks. :D

Though one other semi complicated question. See, my biggest problem with Linux at the moment is that I can't troubleshoot issues like this. If this were in Windows, I would've been up and running in 10 seconds flat. In Linux, I don't know where to look or what to look for when I need to discover what's missing and why. Like you mention dpkg.log. I don't know to look for files like that, so when something happens, I just have to guess and hope for the best.

What's a good resource to use to find out what's missing, what's running, and how to fix things in Linux? Something a little more direct than random guessing and tons of Googling?

edit: I should also add that my default output is now working, but my input isn't giving me a test tone in Gstreamer. I'm still missing something, and trying to apt-get install those missing plugins mentioned in the terminal didn't net me anything, and looking them up in Synaptics leads me to esound. I'm thinking I'm still pretty patchy over here.

Al_B on 4/10/2013 at 13:28

Quote Posted by Renzatic

Though one other semi complicated question. See, my biggest problem with Linux at the moment is that I can't troubleshoot issues like this. If this were in Windows, I would've been up and running in 10 seconds flat. In Linux, I don't know where to look or what to look for when I need to discover what's missing and why. Like you mention dpkg.log. I don't know to look for files like that, so when something happens, I just have to guess and hope for the best.

What's a good resource to use to find out what's missing, what's running, and how to fix things in Linux? Something a little more direct than random guessing and tons of Googling?

That's a bit of a tricky one to answer. One of the problems is that Linux has so many different possible configurations and has developed over the years there's no one resource that will cover exactly how your system is set up. I appreciate that online searches aren't always much help - it would be like not knowing anything about windows and trying to find out what's gone wrong without necessarily knowing if what you were reading was for Windows 7 or for Windows 3.1.

I know when I started using Linux I spent a lot of time reading man pages for aspects of the system, going thorough FAQs / HOWTOs and building and installing software myself - largely because that was the only option at the time. Even though things are easier with graphical interfaces and package managers these days it's still worth at least reading some FAQs on the distribution you're using to get a feel for how things fit together - makes it much easier to understand what's going on under the hood. For example, the documentation about (https://help.ubuntu.com/10.04/serverguide/apt-get.html) apt-get explains it's using dpkg and that the history is stored in /var/log/dpkg.log. In fact, it probably wasn't necessary to go directly to that file - it looks like Elementary has a Software Centre application that contains a history section with a log of what was removed and when.

As far as the sound problem with inputs - I have noticed another package that was uninstalled; libpulsedsp. Once I re-installed it I then at least got the option to unmute my sound input on my laptop but I don't have a convenient source just at the moment to see if it works in other applications.

Renzatic on 5/10/2013 at 04:52

I've got the problem long since fixed (well, at least as far as I know), though since you've brought up different distros, I might as well ask you a few questions.

See, I'm one of those weird people who seem to think Gnome 3 is the best thing ever. I love the way it's set up. But from what I hear, Gnome 3 doesn't play as well with Ubuntu as it should since they started doing their own thing with Unity. Like if I were to ever get sick of Elementary (which I doubt will happen), and want to switch to it, I should use another distro that's been built entirely around it, like Fedora.

My question is, are there any huge differences between distros besides building a custom set of packages and libraries around the same kernel? Like if I were to go to Fedora or Arch (I doubt I'll be doing Arch anytime soon, honestly), would I run into programs that won't work because they're built around Debian OSes, or are linux apps compatible across the entire distro spectrum provided I have the proper libraries installed and whatnot?

This is the best and worst thing about Linux. You've got choice, but you don't always have compatibility and ease of use.

june gloom on 9/10/2013 at 22:44

gnome 3: gnome harder

Renzatic on 10/10/2013 at 01:14

Quote Posted by Albert

Hope this answers your question.

It does. Thanks :D

Also, it should be Gnome 3: Gnome Hard with a Vengeance. COMEON, PEOPLE! GET IT RIGHT!