Linux and Sound

[Ted Roche]

"Linux and Sound" might be too over-arching a presentation topic, but it 
might be fun if we have someone in the group (or perhaps at a nearby 
vendor of Linux distributions, hint, hint) who has an understanding of 
the depth and breadth of sound issues on Linux. There are driver issues, 
ALSA issues, OSS issues, ESD issues and now PulseAudio issues. I'd be 
interested in attending a presentation if anyone knows how to diagnose, 
troubleshoot and fix problems like this. Maybe there are some tools I'm 
not aware of. This seems like a common complaint.

One of the fellows at MonadLUG was bemoaning the fact that sound would 
no longer work after running Wine and he could only figure out how to 
get it going again by rebooting.

I had something similar, with my Fedora 8 system. After a 
suspend-and-resume cycle, sound would no longer play. I couldn't find 
any widgets to wiggle or daemons to restart to get it to work, but sound 
would be back after the next time I restarted my machine. My Google-foo 
was not very powerful on this one, but I finally found a work-around, here:

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Bugs/F8Common#head-97f4b5519a7205c8d52e77f99543434cc882936a

which essential says to toggle from terminal to X session "a couple of 
times" and sound will return. Alt-Ctrl-F3 to a terminal window and 
Ctrl-Alt-F7 once didn't work, but Ctrl-Alt-F4 and Ctrl-Alt-F7 three 
times did :)

Bizarre, but it's a work-around that I thought might help others.

So, would anyone be interested in talking about this at a LUG meeting, 
or coralling someone who would?