Hi again, YES, replying to my own posting!
The reson is I read in a stackexchange article where someone solved this
problem and before I follow its advice, I figured I'd get a second
opinion.
The detail is below my original post:
On Wed, 20 Sep 2023, Richard Troy wrote:
Hello everyone,
I'm new to the KDE community and have found it's both large and welcoming!
And someone pointed me here as one of the places to ask about this problem.
Here's my scenario:
Fedora Server 38, fresh installation, NO GNOME (!!), then an installation of
KDE with a few utilities from other distributions. At this point I had
rhythmbox working just fine.
The next morning, rhythmbox NOT running, so I don't know WHEN the problem
occurred and therefore exactly what changed, but to finish things off, I
needed to add some scanner software, didn't know much about the available
packates so I installed a number of packages for testing, including two
non-scanner-related packages:
gimp skanlite sane gscan2pdf simple-scan kdenlive
I also had mounted some NFS disks from the local net and needed to update the
system's authorization files, so I moved in configurations for a number of
other users and groups so that the file permissions information is all
available on this box (I run a modest server farm). It's possible but
unlikely I botched the auth-files somehow.
OH, and if it might matter: I've had SERIOUS problems with "Wayland", I can't
even log in successfully with it - the session always crashes - yet KDE's
cog-wheel type icon there during login somehow disappeared, thus taking the
"Xorg" login option away, and so, not taking the time to do it better, I'm
now logging in to "multi-user mode" (textually,) and then running xinit with
a pointer to the KDE startup program. This works fine but it does change the
ownership of some running processes from root to my user-id. AND, notably, I
was running rhythmbox and playing music as I worked after having done this,
so I think it's unlikely it's related to this audio problem, but I don't
really know that.
Later, when I decided to play something, I discovered that the speaker icon
on the lower right has a red slash across it and when mouse-hovered over it
says: "No output or input devices found"
Since then I've done a LOT of homework, including swapping out the whole
operating system disk for one from one of the server systems, and thus proved
the hardware is just fine.
Along the way I found that there was a conflicting version of piperwire,
namely:
- package pipewire-pulseaudio-0.3.80-1.fc38.x86_64 from @System conflicts
with pulseaudio provided by pulseaudio-16.1-4.fc38.x86_64 from fedora
So I fixed that.
Some software packages claim there's no audio hardware, but alsactl says
there are either two or three "cards", depending on whether or not I've got a
USB based plug-and-play controller plugged in. The other two are HDMI, and
"Realtek ACL1220". There are SIX HDMI-capable monitors (all connected via
"displayport" connectors - more on that in a moment), and while I've NEVER
used them, these ASUS monitors MAY have built in speakers - I don't know.
Meanwhile the Realtek is a garden-variety built-in affair that comes with the
motherboard.
I've tried "dnf update", installed alsa-tools, alsa-ucm-utils,
pulseaudio-utils and pulseaudio itself (which is when I found the conflict
noted above), and tried using these as best I can as a Linux audio novice ...
and everything else I can think of...
OK, short of a fresh installation and NOT installing things I now know I
won't need, ideas?
Now, about the HDMI stuff: The video card's manufacturer claims one can have
independent audio streams per display - but again, I don't use them.
Thanks - oh, and if there's a better forum for this, please point me there!
Regards,
Richard
Their recommendation was:
dnf groupupdate multimedia --setop=”install_weak_deps=False”
--exclude=PackageKit-gstreamer-plugin --allowerasing
I tried it so far as to get to the yes/no question so I could see what it
does - it wants to install and remove as follows:
Installing group/module packages:
ffmpeg x86_64 6.0-11.fc38 rpmfusion-free-updates
gstreamer1-plugin-libav x86_64 1.22.5-1.fc38 updates
gstreamer1-plugin-openh264 x86_64 1.22.1-1.fc38 fedora-cisco-openh264
gstreamer1-plugins-bad-freeworld
x86_64 1:1.22.5-1.fc38 rpmfusion-free-updates
gstreamer1-plugins-ugly x86_64 1:1.22.5-1.fc38 rpmfusion-free-updates
libheif-freeworld x86_64 1.16.2-1.fc38 rpmfusion-free-updates
pipewire-gstreamer x86_64 0.3.80-1.fc38 updates
pipewire-pulseaudio x86_64 0.3.80-1.fc38 updates
pipewire-utils x86_64 0.3.80-1.fc38 updates
qt5-qtwebengine-freeworld x86_64 5.15.12-4.fc38 rpmfusion-free-updates
Installing dependencies:
ffmpeg-libs x86_64 6.0-11.fc38 rpmfusion-free-updates
gstreamer1-plugins-ugly-free
x86_64 1.22.5-1.fc38 updates
libavdevice x86_64 6.0-11.fc38 rpmfusion-free-updates
libde265 x86_64 1.0.12-1.fc38 rpmfusion-free-updates
libfreeaptx x86_64 0.1.1-4.fc37 rpmfusion-free
librtmp x86_64 2.4-22.20190330.gitc5f04a5.fc37
rpmfusion-free
mjpegtools-libs x86_64 2.2.1-3.fc37 rpmfusion-free
pipewire-codec-aptx x86_64 0.3.79-1.fc38 rpmfusion-free-updates
svt-hevc-libs x86_64 1.5.1-4.fc37 rpmfusion-free
Installing weak dependencies:
vmaf-models noarch 2.3.0-5.fc38 fedora
Removing dependent packages:
ffmpeg-free x86_64 6.0-4.fc38 @updates
libavcodec-free x86_64 6.0-4.fc38 @updates
libavdevice-free x86_64 6.0-4.fc38 @updates
libavfilter-free x86_64 6.0-4.fc38 @updates
libavformat-free x86_64 6.0-4.fc38 @updates
libavutil-free x86_64 6.0-4.fc38 @updates
libpostproc-free x86_64 6.0-4.fc38 @updates
libswresample-free x86_64 6.0-4.fc38 @updates
libswscale-free x86_64 6.0-4.fc38 @updates
pulseaudio x86_64 16.1-4.fc38 @fedora
pulseaudio-module-bluetooth
x86_64 16.1-4.fc38 @fedora
I'm not thrilled about the rpmfusion stuff, but I need this fixed...
Thanks for any help,
Richard
