Sound Issue in Fedora 8

Written by BinnyVA on November 14, 2007 – 5:48 pm -

Music

Today I upgraded my system from Fedora 7 to Fedora 8. The installation process went very smoothly. But once the installation was done, I started the long process of configuring it. That’s when I ran into the sound issue in Fedora 8 - and based on the forum posts, so did many others.

Basically, you get this error at KDE startup…

Sound Error Informational Message:
Error while initializing the sound driver:
device: default can't be opened for playback (Permission denied)
The sound server will continue, using the null output device

You will not be able to play any sound - amarok will crash if you try to play anything. But if you run system-config-soundcard(or System -> Administration -> Soundcard Detection), you will be able to hear the test sound. That is because you are running it as root.

Solution 1 - Console-Kit Service

Did you turn of Console-Kit and avahi-daemon startup services using system-config-services? If so, go back and re-enable them.

  • Run system-config-services(or System -> Administration -> Services)
  • Find Console-Kit and enable it
  • Find avahi-daemon, enable it
  • Restart the system and see if that fixed the problem.

This worked for me - so I did not try any of the following solutions.

Solution 2 - alsa-plugin

If the first solution did not solve the problem, try removing the pulseaudio plugin for alsa by running this command.

yum remove alsa-plugins-pulseaudio

Solution 3 - Permissions

If neither of the above work, open /etc/security/console.perms.d/50-default-perms and add this line to the top…

<sound>=/dev/dsp* /dev/snd/*

And at the end, add this line…

<console> 0666 <sound> 0600 root

Related Links

Hopefully, your problems are solved by now. If not, here are some links to help you further…

More about Fedora 8 in the next post.


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    • Posted in Audio, Configuration, Fedora, Troubleshooting |

    10 Comments to “Sound Issue in Fedora 8”

    1. Vladislav Rusanov Says:
      November 21st, 2007 at 5:49 pm

      Man thank you for the article. It save me :)

    2. delinek Says:
      December 10th, 2007 at 6:10 am

      The 3rd solution worked for me. finally! Thank you.

      PS. This issue is not only related to Fedora 8. I had the same problem in FC7. I guess there must be some inconsistence (bug?) in applying SELInux security level (from enabled to disabled, in my case).

    3. Human Generated Spam » Bin-Blog Says:
      December 10th, 2007 at 11:20 pm

      [...] spartan300 | tcssey@aol.com | dolcemp3.com | IP: 64.12.116.138 Hhmmm,, this sounds good. but I not yet into upgrading my Fedora7 to 8. i’m not that afraid of changes, but I might incur another error with my linux. I still have lot of work to do, maybe i’ll try this later next week. Thanks though for this blog. In article Sound Issue in Fedora 8 [...]

    4. Garlic Says:
      January 5th, 2008 at 1:20 am

      Thanks for this article.

      Two points:

      1) I had to do the 3rd tweak (permissions fix)

      2) avahi-daemon isn’t necessary since I’m having good luck without it.

      On a more general note, I’ve noticed I have less problems if I use init 5 instead of init 3. Something about GDM connecting to ConsoleKit. Desktop Linux has gotten very strange in recent months..

    5. frustrated Says:
      March 24th, 2008 at 2:02 am

      Well, after giving up on Linux in the 90s I gave it a good try again. I literally spent the past 2-3 weeks troubleshooting the sound issue. I did all the steps above. Result: now even the root user doesn’t have sound. Whatever I try, it makes things worse.
      My verdict: this is 2008. If it takes this much trouble to try to get SOUND WORKING on a PC, then f%^(*_ off and take your substandard piece of garbage with you. This is by far the worse OS I have ever tried. It’s so bad, it’s not worth my time. Enough….

    6. ankita Says:
      March 29th, 2008 at 9:09 pm

      thanks a million.. was a very frustrating problem especially since im new to linux..the second solution worked for me ..

    7. liky Says:
      March 31st, 2008 at 8:23 am

      I install VLC in my fedora8,but i don’t know how to start it .can you help me?

    8. Animesh Says:
      April 1st, 2008 at 10:11 am

      —–
      frustrated wrote:

      Well, after giving up on Linux in the 90s I gave it a good try again. I literally spent the past 2-3 weeks troubleshooting the sound issue.
      My verdict: this is 2008. If it takes this much trouble to try to get SOUND WORKING on a PC, then f%^(*_ off and take your substandard piece of
      ———–

      You seem to be a windows or mac os kiddie. Go back and play with your toys. Linux is not for you. If you want a multimedia box in which you can play movies only try windows vista (shitiest os). If you want plain simple distros…pay some money and get urself RHEL, fedora is a bad choice. Linux is and always will be a g33ks box, not a kiddies tool.

    9. BinnyVA Says:
      April 1st, 2008 at 11:39 pm

      @Animesh
      Please don’t feed the trolls. Ignoring them is the best course of action.

    10. liky Says:
      April 2nd, 2008 at 9:44 am

      I just a new learner.my job is about embedded Linux.

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