LMDE - No sound & super fast flash after update

[mort]

Hope I'm in the right place for this!

Well I've been using Mint for a good few years now so I decided to try the Debian version as I'd like all the folks I have convinced to move onto Mint from M$ to have a rolling install rather than me have to spend hours with a pile of machines of various makes and models updating to latest versions of Mint! Debian is super quick and so much about it makes sense but its not without its problems and here's mine...

Unfortunately after updating the fresh install, I always loose sound and the flash plugin sets flash to play super fast. I tried re-installing and holding back on flash updates but that doesn't solve it! Also I'm unable to play M$ media plugins on either firefox, chrome etc...

I have a reasonable system that's running an AMD64bit X6 processor and upto date hardware bought less than 3 months ago (more details on request as I'm trying to write this AND look after my two year old lad who's in destructor mode!!!)

I have searched up and down through the forum but nothing seems to work for me... I've figured that the flash isn't the culprit from holding it back but at that point I'm stumped... The firefox plugin 'flash aid' did in the intiial install fix the problem but then the sound and flash died on a big update... Uninstalling the pulse sometimes works but its crashed the system on a couple of the re-install's... So I'm guessing my sound and flash issues are caused by the same thing?

I'm out of my depth here and even though I've tried for days to fix it myself I'm gutted I've failed...

[zerozero]

hi,
just a couple questions to help figure out what's going on:
- which version of LMDE you have installed: Gnome or XFCE?
- how are you updating the system, with MintUpdate, synaptic or the terminal?

[mort]

I'm running Gnome (as XFCE has trouble with my dual monitors at the moment)

Initially I use Mint Update after I found out via this forum that I needed to install the Mint Update 'Update' before anything else! I will then use synaptic to add and change anything else and I will use the terminal if required with a bit of help from here/google...

Any help much appreciated!

[zerozero]

this may not fix your sound and flash issues, but will give you the full Debian experience of LMDE

http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=141&t=67502

http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=34&t=69859

http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=46&t=70919

http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=141&t=67561

so, basically, try in the terminal

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sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

and see if any of those issues is still there, if so, we can from there

[mort]

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade results in the following...

0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded

I was fairly certain it would as I've been routing around with synaptic trying to figure out whats going on and eventually plumbed on ignoring mint update and its 1-5 "rules" and just updating everything..(I'm testing LMDE as my full time OS... If I wanted stable I'd be using Main etc)... as I say.. I'm out of my depth

Willing to fix this if only to help solve the issue for others....

[mort]

OK this is interesting... I tried running a You Tube vid in 720p and as usual it started to whizz through it... I paused it... wound it back and started using the mouse to drag through it frame by frame... Purely by habit (as I will often use this frame by frame method to view more technical videos) I pressed the play button after about 30 seconds of frame by frame and the video played at normal speed...??

Still no sound on the system (I'm not removing pulse audio at this stage as I'm hoping everything is interconnected and fixing the problem will solve the audio and flash issue) but that seems to me, rather odd...

Any thoughts folks??

[mort]

Right... here's whats odd... I played with the Pulse Audio sound preferences today after doing a bit of reading via google... For some reason I've been presented with a Proile box under the hardware tab of sound preferences... It wasn't there before but I now have sound on my system after setting the sound to Analog Surround 4.0 Output rather than the Analogue stereo Duplex that was pre-selected...

So between that and flash working okayish (issues with full sizing the video and still trying to run fast from time to time) I'm going to continue testing with this install and see what I can break next...

All updates done today via Mint Update with options 1-5 selected... checked it out in synaptic just to be sure but everything was caught by MU no probs... Puter running well and still a lot quicker than my mates i7 vaio running M$ 7...

Hoping to see LMDE become stable enough to install across half a dozen machines in the near future...

[aeternal]

eheh, complete stability I think you won't see it. Simply because LMDE is based on Debian Sid, namely the unstable version. (there is the stable, the testing and the unstable).

If you want to have a minimum of stability what I can recommend is to set only Level 1, 2 and 3 packages. As you can see in the description (Mintupdate > Edit > Preferences) level 4 says:
Unsafe packages. Could potentially affect the stability of the system.
While level 5:
Dangerous packages. Known to affect the stability of the systems depending on certain specs or hardware

It depends on you, if for you isn't a problem to deal with a broken system keep all five levels. If not, just a part of it. Another thing you may do before updating is to keep an eye at the forum, for instance the topic:
http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=141&t=70230 or http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=141&t=67502
where people report what should not be updated because is known to give problems.
Besides that LMDE is, as said, based on Debian Sid, however it is still a little bit more stable since there is the mint behind it, however they can't grant you that your system will not break. Moreover, as far as I know, after Mint 11 the plans are to focus a little bit more on LMDE, therefore such stability will increase.

In my case I like LMDE, sometimes it may be frustrating when something doesn't work, but when you fix it you really learned something and I couldn't ask anything more than this

[zerozero]

Simply because LMDE is based on Debian Sid

no it's not LMDE is based in testing

[aeternal]

Yeah, you are probably right. I read somewhere in his post he had Sid repos, so I guessed he was tracking Sid. But I just read it again and I can't find it anymore O.O I guess I read it in a different post and answered it here xD however this is what I meant by saying it

[scottie_z]

Okay, first Mint post -- I'm a recent Ubuntu refugee.

I'm joining this discussion as I am having exactly the same problem as Mort. Under the Dec. 2010 LMDE live CD, I have working sound and flash. After an

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apt-get update ; apt-get dist-upgrade

analog sound output is gone and flash is too fast.

Now, the flash I am not so concerned about, so I will focus on the sound issues here. First, we do actually have an analog sound device:

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~$ lspci | grep -i audio
00:14.2 Audio device: ATI Technologies Inc SBx00 Azalia (Intel HDA)
01:05.1 Audio device: ATI Technologies Inc RS880 Audio Device [Radeon HD 4200]

And under the Dec. 2010 live CD, everything works great:

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~ $ aplay -l
**** List of PLAYBACK Hardware Devices ****
card 0: SB [HDA ATI SB], device 0: VT1708S Analog [VT1708S Analog]
  Subdevices: 2/2
  Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
  Subdevice #1: subdevice #1
card 0: SB [HDA ATI SB], device 1: VT1708S Digital [VT1708S Digital]
  Subdevices: 1/1
  Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 1: HDMI [HDA ATI HDMI], device 3: ATI HDMI [ATI HDMI]
  Subdevices: 1/1
  Subdevice #0: subdevice #0

However, after a dist-upgrade from the command line the VT1708S devices vanish:

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~$ aplay -l
**** List of PLAYBACK Hardware Devices ****
card 0: HDMI [HDA ATI HDMI], device 3: HDMI 0 [HDMI 0]
  Subdevices: 1/1
  Subdevice #0: subdevice #0

The closest forum I can find is http://forums.debian.net/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=63720, but I tried all of that and nothing changed. Any help will be greatly appreciated. I understand that there a new liveCD of LMDE will be made sometime after Katya is released, and I would be willing to re-install at that point -- I am interested enough in the idea of this distribution to put some time in.

Incidentally, if anyone can humor an enthusiastic but uninformed new community member, where should bugs be reported? Since most of the application packages come straight from debian testing, I would have thought that one would use the Debian bug lists. However, I saw a reference here
(http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=141&t=54647) that bugs should be reported on Launchpad. Is that just for mint-specific packages?

[scottie_z]

Well, I didn't do anything, but sound is back and flash seems to play normally now. I did do a hard reboot -- since the update I think I had only done a soft reboot. But still, weird. Mort, are your problems persisting?

[mort]

No mate... after lots of fiddling and so on and lots of updates it all sort of fixed itself... Not sure I spotted anything in the updates that would affect anything but slowly but surely its all settled down...

I'm not complaining either

[denisok]

Actually had the same issue. Incorrect default sink was set after packages upgrade.
I have set it to my internal sound card in PulseAudio Manager and all works perfectly now.
http://pulseaudio.org/wiki/DefaultDevice