General Sound Problem on iBook G4

[Don_Fuzzel]

Hey all,

this is my first post here and I hope that this is the right section to ask.

I installed Ubuntu 12.04 for PowerPC on a iBook G4 probably made in 2005. I was having a couple of complications during the installation which I was able to fix by browsing the awesome Ubuntu community.
But now I am trying to get the sound working and even by browsing the community I can't figure out a solution.

It seems to me that no sounds at all are played, I checked out .mp3-Files as well as DVDs. The only sound I ever heard is a chime that comes directly after pressing the start button. This is exactly the same sound it used to play when Mac OS X was still installed.
I already made sure that the volume for the playback software is turned up and I also tried the files as well as the DVDs on a different device.

I tried a couple of troubleshooting steps from the SoundTroubleshooting guide ( https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SoundTroubleshooting ), but none seems to work. I especially want to point out these Terminal outputs:

Entering sudo aplay -l returns:
aplay: device_list:252: no soundcards found...

Entering lspci -v | grep -A7 -i "audio" doesn't return anything at all.

I am not very experienced with Ubuntu and the terminal and don't fully understand these outputs. Does this mean that the sound card isn't even physically recognized? How do I fix this?

The sound was still working two weeks ago when Mac OS X was installed on it, so I am certain that the sound card should still be working.

Thank you very much in advance. Help would be appreciated.

Don Fuzzel

[Don_Fuzzel]

Alright, after spending another day of research on the issue, I finally found a couple of sources that partially contradicted each other but in the end helped me solve the problem.
As I have the impression that this problem appears from time to time, I hereby share the steps I followed to solve the problem (note that I only tested this on exactly the iBook that I described in Post #1):



Make sure that the sound modules are installed by entering this in the terminal:
find /lib/modules/`uname -r` | grep sndA long list of items is supposed to show up. If not, install the sound modules by entering:
sudo apt-get install linux-restricted-modules-`uname -r` linux-generic
Then open the /etc/modules file:
sudo nano /etc/modules
Make sure that no references to sound modules are written in this file. Particularly delete the lines snd-powermac and/or snd-aoa... if you see them. Then save the file with Ctrl+O and exit with Ctrl+X.
Then delete the following blacklist by typing:
sudo rm /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.local.conf
After rebooting the system aplay -l will give you this output:
**** List of PLAYBACK Hardware Devices ****
card 0: SoundByLayout [SoundByLayout], device 0: Master []
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
You made the first big step to the solution as the sound card is now recognized.
lspci -v | grep -A7 -i "audio" still doesn't return anything anyway, because the sound card is not connected via PCI but it is onboard.
Then you type alsamixer and make sure that the master volume is at 100% by using the arrow keys.
Now use amixer to get a whole lot of information about your sound configuration. I noticed that the value at Simple mixer control 'PCM' is zero. Set it to a moderate value with:
amixer sset 'PCM' 100
The highest possible value is 177 but that will give you a very distorted and overloud sound. I figured that 100 is comfortable.
This should be it, at least it worked for me. You can check your sound by entering:
aplay /usr/share/sounds/alsa/Front_Center.wav
You should hear a cold, heartless female computer voice claiming that "Front Center", ...whatever.


I hope that this will help some people. As you can tell, I am pretty newbie, I hope I didn't describe it too detailed.

I also just noticed that steps 5 and 6 are reset after every restart. I will try to find a solution to make these changes permanent. If anyone knows the solution for that, please post it.

These are some of the sources that helped me fix it, but as I said, they partially contradict each other and it was a lot of trial and error for me:
https://answers.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/alsa-driver/+question/201569
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SoundTroubleshooting
http://www.mintppc.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=15&t=1054
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/PowerPCFAQ#Why_do_I_have_no_sound.3F
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2020131&page=2
http://wiki.ubuntuusers.de/amixer

[Don_Fuzzel]

Okay, I found out why the settings made with the alsamixer in steps 5 and 6 of my previous post are reset after every restart:

The reason is that pulseaudio is automatically overwriting all settings made with alsamixer after every restart or booting. To restore the settings automatically, I did this:

Make sure the alsamixer-settings are the way you want them. For me, this means:
amixer sset 'Master' 177 and then amixer sset 'PCM' 100
Then you have to save these settings:
sudo alsactl store 0
Now you need to write a script that restores the settings after pulseaudio has overwritten them:
gedit soundsettingsdelay.sh
Enter these lines:


#!/bin/bash

restore_alsa() {
while [ -z "$(pidof pulseaudio)" ]; do
sleep 0.5
done
alsactl -f /var/lib/alsa/asound.state restore
}
restore_alsa &
Save the script and make it executable: chmod +x soundsettingsdelay.sh
Now add this script to the Startup Applications... You can find them in the dropdown menu of the shutdown button.
This should be it. Restart the system and check if it works without manually restoring the settings.


I would never have found that solution without this source, so thanks a lot to its author:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/PulseAudio#Pulse_overwrites_ALSA_settings