HOWTO: Coldplugging, webcams and soundcards

[Pustulo]

I thought that I would share a solution to a problem that plagued me for a few nights during my ongoing migration to Ubuntu.

The problem:
The integrated soundcard on the motherboard does not appear to work under Gnome.

Observations:
'dmesg' reveals the built-in soundcard is actually detected at one point in the boot process

The volume control applet shows multiple soundcards, the first of which only has one channel - a microphone. The second, appears to be the real card.

Despite gdm startup sound, the gnome session does not use the real soundcard.

Hypothesis:
Hotplug system is configuring the webcam's sound capabilities before the motherboard's integrated soundcard. The order of detection dictates which sound device the gnome session uses as it's sound output device.

Solution:

# /etc/modules: kernel modules to load at boot time.
#
# This file should contain the names of kernel modules that are
# to be loaded at boot time, one per line.  Comments begin with
# a "#", and everything on the line after them are ignored.

Append the name of the integrated soundcard's driver to the /etc/modules file.
e.g.

# echo snd_intel8x0 >> /etc/modules

Hope this helps.

N.B. This is not a problem specific to Ubuntu. In fact, I encountered the same problem under RH9 (which I am migrating from). My solution for that installation was to use the hotplug blacklist, although I find that answer awfully kludgy.

Colin.