Wayne D's Blog

Before I start let me make it perfectly clear,  I love Linux but it can be so infuriating at times.

We use Linux at Interactive Sports Technologies and it has proven to be rock solid and reliable and we have have no problem with the Soundblaster audio drivers that we use in our flagship product. We have introduced Linux to our digital media guys and they love it too but they had one problem, the audio didn't work on the Dell machines with the built in sound  chip installed in the motherboard. All the drivers loaded OK but no sound came out and when I tried to open the mixer I received an unhelpful error message. 

Warning Linux Geek section begins!!! Reading this section may make your eyes glaze over. Scroll down to skip over.

Off to the internet I went to search for information on what to do to resolve it.  I didn't find the smoking gun but I did garner enough clues that it might be kernel related so I decided to update the kernel to the lastest revision.  Rebooted with the new kernel and X whined, complained and barfed when it started evetually started up with the generic SVGA driver. I had forgotten the Nvidia drivers needed to be reinstalled because they were compiled against the kernel.  Sigh.  Then realized that I couldn't reinstall the Nvidia drivers because I hadn't installed the kernel source. Double Sigh.  Downloaded and installed the kernel source, reinstalled the Nvidia drivers, got X up and running as before, popped a CD in the drive, Gnome CD player automatically started and ..... no sound.  Checked with a test sound, everthing sounded OK. Remembered that in the past I had used alsaplayer because the CD player to sound card audio connection wouldn't work. 

Even though ALSA drivers and tools are installed, alsaplayer isn't included in the distro. Choices, download, compile or install alsaplayer or find a precompiled binary for my distro. Decided to go the precompiled route so I ran a quick Google search and found that the Dries RPM repository had what I needed.  So I updated yum.conf, got it to fetch alsaplayer and the dependant packages I needed but they wouldn't install because I had forgotten to import the GPG key for Dries. Sigh. Off to the Dries website again, get the key install it, install alsaplayer, pop in the CD and ....... success!  Stop alsaplayer, push the eject button so I can eject the CD and go home and ....... nothing. CD drawer stays firmly closed.  No disk icon on the desktop for me to right click on the eject the disk.  Run the disk management tool, it tells me there are mounted filesystems I can unmount.  Open a shell prompt, try to unmount the cdrom, mount tells me the filesystem isn't in fstab.

Off to Google again, find out about the eject command. Try it, cryptic error message. Su to root, try eject command again, CD drawer opens. Mutter to myself, what kind of an OS lets me put a CD in the drive but won't let me take it out? A little more Google research and I find out about PAM (Pluggable Authentication Modules). Fiddle with  /etc/security/console.perms, add the user into the disk group, think it worked on one machine but doesn't seem to work on another.  Finally lose patience, set the sticky bit on the eject program and call it a day.

Linux Geek section ends

Like I said at the beginning I love Linux but some days it can be like the old dog who sits beside your easy chair who you reach down to pet every so often. The one day you reach down to pet him and he bites you.

I know what you are going to say, I should have used another distro, there is a much easier way to do what I did.....  My main point is that it really shouldn't be this hard.  Many people would have reached either for the screwdriver or the Windows CD. 

 BTW the picture above is from Lazy Daisy Log, I've asked her for permission to use it I hope she says yes.