Audio issue - was Re: Starting Wayland-KDE on FC39

[Richard Troy]

Hi Dave, René, Duncan, et al,

Thank you for your posts as your discussion from just before Thanksgiving 
(in the USA) seems VERY pertinent regarding a problem I'm experiencing.

Just catching up from Thanksgiving and follow-on travels (travails!), and 
this thread that Dave kicked off, has me thinking that perhaps a solution 
for what I've got happening might not be far off, but I can use a little 
more assistance, if anyone has a clue.

Firstly, I find what Dave's initial email describes is VERY close to my 
experience, and secondly, I think the video-card likely had or has 
something to do with it, though it's working fine now. ...I think Duncan's 
permissions dialogue is most exciting if only I knew what to do there 
about his suggestions!

Note that I wrote this reply BEFORE seeing some of the later additions to 
this thread: I don't think my problem can benefit from the later dialogue, 
BUT it MIGHT be that my experience can help Dave - I'll call that out at 
the specific spot below. To wit:

Regarding my problem: I think a permissions issue is surely the cause 
because "everything works" in KDE EXCEPT the sound, and some weird aspects 
of USB (for example, mouse / kbd are fine, but a phone can only be 
accessed via root), (oh, and the screen saver transitions from working to 
not working at weird times and I have no idea why - but then, I don't care 
about that, either).

The big deal is that KDE thinks there's no sound card, yet I discovered 
quite by accident that when I open one of the "console windows" (via 
ctl-alt-f3, for example) and log in, ANY and ALL audio I was trying to 
play in KDE is suddenly heard on the speakers, as if it was playing all 
along! I think this is a seriously good clue, and to my mind the issue is 
how I'm starting X / KDE. Unfortunately, though I've used X-11 for around 
35 years or so, I'm far from an expert as up until now "it just works."

How I got here? I'm not sure it's worthy of a lot of time, but one detail 
might help Dave. So ... I run a mostly Fedora shop (for historical 
reasons) and recently (mid September, I think) I replaced my venerable 
desktop box (not Fedora) with a fresh installation of Fedora Server 38 
with KDE added. I had a LOT of work to do to get it configured for my 
use-case. At first audio under Wayland worked. But when I did an update 
(NOT AN UPGRADE - I kept it at 38), I strongly suspect some video driver 
got replaced (I have an unusual 6-head Radeon, single-card video) because 
afterward not only did audio not work but I then entered The Twilight-Zone 
that Dave describes (pertinent excerpts left below for reference) with 
booting issues and Wayland not starting, DM behaviors and so forth. It 
wasn't the same experience Dave reports but was an eerily close parallel.

I struggled mightily to get KDE up again at all. And once I did, the audio 
and weird USB problem showed up.

I never got Wayland working at all since then, or any graphical login 
(not that I'm a fan of that either, like Dave) and I don't care to solve 
it unless it helps solve the audio issue. ...Instead I get x-11 up by 
logging in via the "console" as a non-root user and then running a script 
similar to what Dave does.

Where Dave runs:

/usr/bin/dbus-run-session /usr/bin/startplasma-wayland

I run:

xinit /etc/X11/startplasma-x11

If I try the X11 version of the startplasma script Dave uses, it complains 
about DISPLAY and not being able to connect to the server, likely because 
the server's not up yet! I haven't tried all permutations yet, however.

...I think Duncan's on to something when he talks about users belonging in 
certain groups to solve this sort of thing. Any suggestions for WHAT 
groups I try adding the my user to? (Excerpt of Duncan's pertinent bits 
below, too).

Any and all suggestions welcome. Not having sound is a really serious 
issue and I've spent a LOT of time on this already... I guess I just don't 
have the systems-internals knowledge I need.

Thanks
Richard

On Mon, 20 Nov 2023, Duncan wrote:

...snip...

Anyway, sans policykit/consolekit/etc, the solution to device permissions
issues is normally to add the appropriate users to the appropriate group
(see what the device group is set as and try that, if your user isn't
already in that group), or possibly to change the udev config to loosen
the permissions a bit (does the device need to be writable by users in
that group?).  Maybe that still applies to (and doesn't get overwritten
by) *kit installations?

On Sun, 19 Nov 2023, Dave Close wrote:

...snip...

> Now on the same machine with FC39 (upgraded with system-upgrade) this
> no longer works. Instead, it produces 248 lines of output and then
> terminates. Reviewing those lines, it appears that it is complaining
> about, 'failed to open drm device at "/dev/dri/card0"' and 'No suitable
> DRM devices have been found'. I'm not sure what device that refers
> to but there seems to be some indication that it is my display. The
> display certainly works fine for the virtual terminal I use to run
> this script, and it also works fine for X11 if I run "startx".
>
> Ok, so as a fallback I tried a graphic login. This reaches a completely
> blank screen and goes no further. The machine is up as I can reach it
> with SSH but the display is useless. It responds to Ctrl-Alt-Delete
> but nothing else. I can't get it to switch to a different desktop. I
> noticed that SDDM defaults to Wayland so I changed "sddm.conf" to
> include "DisplayServer=x11". The allowed the graphic login to reach
> a login page but nothing I entered there was accepted even when I
> switched to specify starting an X11 session instead of Wayland.

--
Richard Troy, Chief Scientist
Science Tools Corporation
510-717-6942
rtroy at ScienceTools.com, http://ScienceTools.com/