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

[Andy B]

Hi Richard,

Thank you for the question. I wanted to mention that you can find
specific groups that deal with your specific question when you see
this page: https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved

We use live chat or forums for these analysis-based questions. I am
sure you will find a good answer there.

Thank you,

Andy

On Wed, Sep 20, 2023 at 12:31 PM Richard Troy <rtroy at sciencetools.com> 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



-- 
Andy (anditosan)