GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 144769
Volume Control (2.6.1) reports modem as primary sound card
Last modified: 2004-12-22 21:47:04 UTC
1. Start Gnome. 2. Select Volume Control from multimedia menu two tabs are displayed - 1. "Conexant, Cx20468 rev1, Conexant [Audio Mixer (OSS)]" and 2. ali 5451 [Alsa Mixer] This system is a laptop - hp ze4145 with the ATI IGP 320M hardware. Similar results are reported for different versions of similar laptops. There is nothing special - at least to me - in the lspci output that I'll include below. ======================================================================= lbash-2.05b# lspci 0000:00:00.0 Host bridge: ATI Technologies Inc AGP Bridge [IGP 320M] (rev 13) 0000:00:01.0 PCI bridge: ATI Technologies Inc PCI Bridge [IGP 320M] (rev 01) 0000:00:02.0 USB Controller: ALi Corporation USB 1.1 Controller (rev 03) 0000:00:06.0 Multimedia audio controller: ALi Corporation M5451 PCI AC-Link Controller Audio Device (rev 02) 0000:00:07.0 ISA bridge: ALi Corporation M1533 PCI to ISA Bridge [Aladdin IV] 0000:00:08.0 Modem: ALi Corporation M5457 AC'97 Modem Controller 0000:00:0a.0 CardBus bridge: O2 Micro, Inc. OZ6912 Cardbus Controller 0000:00:10.0 IDE interface: ALi Corporation M5229 IDE (rev c4) 0000:00:11.0 Bridge: ALi Corporation M7101 Power Management Controller [PMU] 0000:00:12.0 Ethernet controller: National Semiconductor Corporation DP83815 (MacPhyter) Ethernet Controller 0000:01:05.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc Radeon Mobility U1
well, i see no bug here it find both your ALSA driver and its OSS emulation equivalent and have to way to know those are the same device Alsa & OSS report device name differently
Pardon my ignorance... why does gnome do this and kde does not? Is there something I've overlooked that I need to disable this? I've used a number of the 2.6ish kernels, and this last rebuild is the first time I've had this happen. I've been using the same kernel config, so nothing has changed there. The problem is that what it seems to detect is my modem (winmodem) and that shouldn't be reported as a sound device (IMO).
I'd like some comments from the usability people here. There's ways around this, but your modem is essentially a sound device.
I understand that "technically" a modem - esp. a winmodem - is a sound device. From a moron user perspective (i hope I'm a FEW levels above that) this isn't an easy thing to deal with. In order to get around it, i have to - every time i start a session - open the volume control and select the second tab, else I have no sound output. If there is another way to get around it, i'm open to messing with configurations and the like. But for an end result, this isn't the "user-friendly" way to get around this.
I'm curious as to what's going on here... this is a pretty major problem and I can't imagine I'm the only one having it... perhaps the only one raising the issue, but not the only one experiencing it. Let me know what further information I need to supply to help resolve this.
Remove the OSS plugins if you really want to get rid of the OSS device. It's a hack, but it'll work. I have some plans on solving this in a more subtle way, but that takes some time. I'll be able to do that at the end of August, when I've finished my studies.
Modems without mixers are no longer shown in volume control. That should make this fixed.