I am running xfce; many years ago, I installed xubuntu, but now I’m not sure whether the system still qualifies as xubuntu, as Ubuntu Studio, or as a mismash of various flavors. I am running xfce as my desktop, however.
Problem Description:
Audio has always worked properly for me under 22.04 However, since I performed the upgrade to 24.04, I have no working sound. There is nothing I can do to make an audible noise of any kind come out of this machine, either via speakers connected to a motherboard backplane line out jack or by headphones on a front-of-case headphone jack.
Relevant System Information:
Motherboard audio is Realtek ALC887-VD based HDA Intel PCH (as Alsamixer tells me).
Screenshots or Error Messages:
What I’ve Tried:
What I have done:
Checked my line out and headphone connections;
Forced a sound module reload, first by simply rebooting the machine, then by “alsa force-reload”;
Made sure that my built-in audio card was selected:
Viewed the output devices in pavucontrol to verify that PulseAudio’s configuration is correct:
Verified that nothing is muted in alsamixer:
Restarted the PulseAudio service via “$ systemctl --user restart pulseaudio.service” (both without and with sudo).
None of these have had any effect.
I can’t for the life of me imagine why the upgrade would break my audio, which worked perfectly beforehand. But I have multiple telehealth appointments in the next 48 hours and I really want to not have to cancel them. So I’m hoping I can get my audio working again.
I’m sorry if this should be obvious to me; but that guide suggests putting the information dug up this way in a new topic “in another tab.” I don’t know what’s meant by “another tab” in this context.
Also, is making another topic really what I should do here? I would have thought posting multiple topics about the same issue would annoy people.
I am really desperate to solve this, as it’s going to cost me a lot of money (medical appt. cancellation fees) and, worse, a lot of time if I can’t get my sound working again by tomorrow afternoon.
You mention Ubuntu Studio; and a mismash of various flavors which may confuse things a little. In the end they’re all Ubuntu, however if you’ve made heavy changes to your system, the major changes that can occur at release-upgrade time can be interfered with.
A major change in audio occurred after 22.04, being the switch from PulseAudio (22.04) to PipeWIre, change varying between flavors on when; with various release notes/blogs telling users how they could modify their 22.04 system to get this early; if you followed any of those instructions, those changes should have been reverted prior to release-upgrade.
The Ubuntu Studio 24.04 LTS Release notes highlighted some possible problems with removed packages; did you read the notes? and check for any of that impacting you? and/or running the suggested mitigation?
You already have a support question on this site; the start a new topic as I read the page you’re referring to, relates to those that don’t already have a support question open.
Download a Xubuntu (or your preferred flavour) 24.04 ISO and create a USB installer.
Boot into a “Try Ubuntu” live session and test your sound, graphics, ethernet, wifi etc.
Use the live session for your medical consultations.
If you make the USB with persistence, then you can use it as a temporary system to solve the immediate worry about your appointments.
So, from when I first installed Ubuntu (back at Intrepid, I think), I have installed xubuntu; but then manually apt-get installed the ubuntu-studio package on top of it. I did that because I’m a musician and wanted the audio applications that would pull in, and that was the easiest way to get them. In fact, the main reason I chose XFCE as my desktop environment is because I wanted something lightweight so GUI demands wouldn’t mess with audio processing, cause xruns, etc. That’s the mixing of flavors to which I referred.
As a testament to Ubuntu, this approach has worked fine, through numerous OS upgrades and at least one relocation to an entirely new machine, until this past week.
Hmm. I never knew about this, so I never did anything to get PipeWire early. And during the release upgrade, while there were a few of the usual questions about ‘existing config file changed from the original installation; keep that one or use the one we’d install now?’, I don’t think any of them had to do with audio, and at any rate I went with the new files each time. However, I can see how such a large change could cause issues.
I confess I hadn’t, sorry. I see that there’s a known issue with Ubuntu Studio upgrades, too. I’ll dig into that right now.
Understood. I’m usually better about such things; but I had a chunk of my brain removed surgically recently (seriously), and am not functioning mentally as well as I used to. All of this is much, much, much harder than it used to be. I apologize.
The upgrade issue referred to in the Ubuntu Studio release notes for 24.04 don’t seem to pertain to me – I didn’t encounter that problem. I also thought the issue about users’ initial audio configuration from the Ubuntu Studio installer not being correct [Bug #2063899 “[SRU] Users are not initially configured properly ...” : Bugs : ubuntustudio-installer package : Ubuntu] didn’t seem to apply; but it did give me the idea of trying to run ubuntustudio-installer, where I had just done a release upgrade before. Strangely, after doing so, vlc started working – I could play audio tracks, watch videos, and play audio CDs using vlc – but no other app I tried worked. Playing CDs with parole produced no sound, YouTube videos in Firefox would not start at all, etc.
So at this point, I figured that my best bet was to just do a clean install. That seemed a repulsive solution to me, but I don’t seem to have the brain power to figure this stuff out that I used to have. So this morning, I set my machine up to back up my user space to some external drives, in anticipation of having them to restore from after I did the new install. And then I went off for a 12-hour day at work. I got home from work, and now everything that would not work 14 hours ago works.
I’m glad it’s working for you now. The sound server did change between your release targets from Pulseaudio to Pipewire. Perhaps they were conflicting with each other after you jumped from 22.04 to 24.04 (in 22.10, the default changed to Pipewire).
Just speculation on my end though, but it would have been nice to collect some information in the broken state, though.
I have never done a version upgrade but I do have a separate /home partition so always have two LTS versions of Xubuntu on my computer using the same /home partition, the new one and the previous one.
I am aware that there are pros and cons of a separate /home partition but in the 15 years I’ve been doing it I have never had any major problems from the config file upgrades that may be installed for the newer Xubuntu version as I keep then older version for emergency use only but boot to the new version by default.
