Bug 114785

Please provide the hardware/system details instead of non-constructive rant :)
Which driver is used, and which application did you use for testing.

Attach /etc/asound.state for checking mixer status.

The fact that you had to start esd implies that it's something else from the
driver but an app or system-backend-related problem.

I'm sorry if you thought my report sounded like a rant.  The only reason I noted
that other distributions did support it was so that you could rule out that it
was hardware without an open source driver - I'm sure you've gotten a lot of
people with Broadcom wireless cards which aren't supported by open source
drivers posting bug reports.  It wasn't meant to be a reflection on SUSE or
anything, but I wasn't sure where configuration files for sound would be and I
wanted to post as much information as I could.

I actually don't have an 'asound.state' file in my /etc directory.  That might
be part of the problem.  I found the 'volume control' window in GNOME and found
that the PCM and speaker were all the way down.  I moved them up and sound seems
to be working.  I'm going to reboot and see if sound starts automatically of if
I have to start esd or something and then I'll post back here.

When I restarted, there was an asound.state.  I'll attach it after this message.
 Sound didn't start up automatically, but running esd did make it function.

Created attachment 48530 [details]
My asound.state file

/etc/asound.state is generated usually at shutdown/reboot by alsaasound init
script.  Without this, all the volumes are set to muted state per default at
boot time.

(BTW, I suppose the driver is snd-intel8x0?  Or is it something else?)

Looking at the attached /etc/asound.state, the values are still low (e.g. Master
volume).  Could you raise the Master volume and reboot again, then check the
mixer status?

For checking, use alsamixer on terminal, instead of GNOME mixer.  GNOME mixer
uses OSS emulation per default, so this isn't accurate and doesn't support all
stuff.

I don't understand well what exactly your problems are.  If you raise/unmute
Master and PCM volumes, does everything work again, including the internal speaker?

The sound is at very good levels now.

Basically, the problem was two-fold.  First, esd wasn't getting started. 
Running esd at a command prompt fixes that, but a more permanent fix can be
found in the GNOME control center by checking 'Enable software sound mixing
(ESD)'.  I assume that should be enabled by default.  Second, the volume slider
in GNOME doesn't adjust the PCM or speaker volume directly.  Rather, if you
right click it and go to 'Open Volume Control' you get the PCM and Speaker
volume which were both as low as they could go by default.  They probably
shouldn't be off by default.

So, if you are able to enable esd at the install time and set the PCM & speaker
volume to have a default setting that isn't off, the problem is fixed.

I hope this helps.

ESD isn't necessary usually because ALSA itself does the software mixing.

The second problem sounds more like a usability issue.  OK, I'll assign this to
GNOME maintainer.

Oh, maybe it's because I have two sound devices on my computer: an ALI 5451
(Alsa Mixer) and a Conexant Cx20468 rev 1,Conexant (OSS Mixer).  I believe the
Conexant one has something to do with my modem and that's the one that the
system is trying to use as default - and it probably doesn't have the normal
capabilities.

I'm going to go through and change the volumes for the Alsa device and disable
esd and then reboot.

That didn't work, unfortunately.  I'm guessing the sound is only being routed to
one device (maybe).  I'm going to attach my latest asound.state which was
created after boosting most of the volumes and unmuting some on the Alsa device.

Created attachment 48602 [details]
new asound.state

ESD not being started by default was a bug that was fixed a few days for RC1.

The gnome part of this was fixed, reassigning to fix the sound config issue.

Fixed in the upstream kernel.