After working fine, audio is unavailable: "No output or input devices found"

[Richard Troy]

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