no sound except speakup

[Didier Spaier]

Hello,

To elaborate on what Kirk said and for the records, is is possible to
make pulse peacefully coexist with apps relying on ALSA without running
PulseAudio system wide.

Just tell PulseAudio to use dmix. For instance in /etc/pulse/default.pa:
load-module module-alsa-sink device=dmix
load-module module-alsa-source device=dsnoop

And make sure that no ALSA configuration file tells it to direct the
streams to PulseAudio, of course <smile>

Also, I start PulseAudio on demand (when an application requests it),
not when starting a console or desktop session.

Best, Didier

On 08/06/2019 18:36, JOHN G HEIM wrote:
> 
> It was indeed pulseaudio. I killed the pulseaudio process and ran aplay 
> again but it still did not work. But I noticed that another pulseaudio 
> process had been started. So then I removed the pulseaudio package 
> entirely. Now it works. But then I ran startx and got no speech from 
> orca. But then I ran spd-conf and configured speech-dispatcher for alsa 
> and now I get speech in the GUI too. So this is all good. This is my 
> network server so I don't care about the GUI too much anyway. But it 
> looks like if I really need a GUI, I'll have it.
> 
> 
> Thanks everybody. Linux rocks. Well, the linux support community, 
> specifically speakup and orca, rocks.
> 
> 
> On 6/5/19 9:22 AM, Kirk Reiser wrote:
>> Hey John: When I've had similar issues with sound it's because there
>> is usually a pulse audio process running or trying to run. There are
>> work arounds to be able to use pulse audio but I believe it includes
>> running it as root or something. I don't use pulse audio so I'm not
>> sure of the work around but others are using it.
>>
>>   Kirk
>>
>> On Wed, 5 Jun 2019, John G Heim wrote:
>>
>>> I am running a debian buster machine in character mode. Speakup with 
>>> software speech works fine but I can't get any other sound. When I 
>>> use aplay to play a wav file, it prints the data indicating that it 
>>> is playing the file but there is no sound. The same with espeak and 
>>> spd-say at the command line. No error messages are displayed but 
>>> there is no sound. I would think it was a volume problem except I can 
>>> hear speakup. The sound card controls have volume settings, they are 
>>> not user settings, right?
>>>
>>>