Having the correct default sound card

[jimcraven]

Not getting sound might be due not having the correct default sound card.

I was having trouble getting the sound to work on my ASUS eeePC running Xenialpup 7.5 (32-bit). For the TL;DR folks, I found that puppy had chosen the PC Speaker as the default sound card instead of the Intel sound card. The fix was to modify /etc/asound.conf to point to the Intel sound card. See https://www.alsa-project.org/main/index ... ult_device for instructions on "Setting the default device". Once the correct device is determined, you can set hw:x in Retrovol to open the control corresponding to that device.

The system having the problem was an ASUS eeePC running Xenialpup 7.5 (32-bit). I had two other systems that did have sound: the same ASUS eeePC running Xenialpup 7.0.6 / 4.1.2-EmSee-32-PAE by musher0 and a Thinkpad running Xenialpup 7.5 (64-bit).

After running a number of tests on all three configurations I saw a pattern. If I explicitly chose my Intel sound card in Xenialpup 7.5 (32-bit), I got sound. If I let it default by not specifying the sound card, I got no sound. It turns out the default sound card was the PC speaker. The other two systems were correctly defaulting to the Intel sound card. Changing the /etc/asound.conf file was the solution to the problem.

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- (default) pcsp
0 HDA Intel         <-- this should be the default
1 pcsp  PC Speaker

defaults.pcm.card 1
defaults.pcm.device 0
defaults.ctl.card 1

*** changed to ***

defaults.pcm.card 0 <--
defaults.pcm.device 0
defaults.ctl.card 0 <--

The attached file shows the comparisons of the configurations and the tests that I ran on all three systems. Hopefully this arsenal of sound tests will be useful to someone else.

Note: The ALSA "speaker-test" was looking for "Front Left" and "Front Right" .wav files that were not in my systems. I found that if I "reinstalled" alsa-utils, those .wav files appeared.

My problem raises the question about Puppy determining the correct sound card to be the default. If I use my bootable flash drive in a different computer, there is a chance /etc/asound.conf won't specify the correct sound card as the default.

alsa-base.conf contains this line that pushes pcsp (PC Speaker) to the end of the sound card order.

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# Keep snd-pcsp from being loaded as first soundcard
options snd-pcsp index=-2

I wonder if there is a way to pick the sound card other than the PC Speaker or the HDMI card(s) as the default.

I hope this helps someone having the same problem I did.

jimcraven