So, KDE has decided to alert me every time I log in that it thinks my sound devices have been removed, and asks if I want to permanently forget them. Considering removing them from the motherboard would require a steady hand and a soldering iron, I'm pretty sure they are in fact still there. So far I have been clicking "No" to KDE's request to forget the devices, prompting a series of popup messages informing me each sound device has failed, before giving up when it hits the last entry in the list.

Last time I used the PC, the sound worked perfectly fine. I did nothing except check my email in Firefox and play music with Amarok. I did not change any configuration, install or remove any packages.

For reference:

Distribution: Kubuntu 11.10
KDE Version: 4.7.4
The Phonon backend is GStreamer (I really have absolutely no idea about all the various stuff to do with sound (ALSA, PulseAudio, OSS, etc.) it's all far too confusing. Some simplification would go a long way to helping people...)

Code: Select all

rob@hydrogen:~$ aplay -l
**** List of PLAYBACK Hardware Devices ****
card 0: SB [HDA ATI SB], device 0: ALC889 Analog [ALC889 Analog]
  Subdevices: 0/1
  Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 0: SB [HDA ATI SB], device 1: ALC889 Digital [ALC889 Digital]
  Subdevices: 0/1
  Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 1: HDMI [HDA ATI HDMI], device 3: HDMI 0 [HDMI 0]
  Subdevices: 0/1
  Subdevice #0: subdevice #0


Information from /proc/asound

Any more information or logs that may be useful, let me know

Moving topic to appropriate location

If you open "System Activity" from KRunner (Alt + F2) can you check to see if a "pulseaudio" process is running?

There's no pulseaudio process running.

Does this dialog appear under a new user as well?
Also, what Phonon backend are you using?

bcooksley wrote:Does this dialog appear under a new user as well?

No. However, new users have no sound, no volume control next to the clock, and clicking System Settings > Multimedia > Phonon causes the System Settings application to crash, requiring a force-quit.

bcooksley wrote:Also, what Phonon backend are you using?

GStreamer 4.5.1, which has worked fine up until now. Switching the backend to VLC 0.4.1 does not help.

At this point I'm thinking of abandoning KDE's unreliability for Gnome. It may be ugly and lack features, but at least it works.

rvalkass wrote:At this point I'm thinking of abandoning KDE's unreliability for Gnome. It may be ugly and lack features, but at least it works.

How about actually updating your system first? Both the phonon-backend-gstreamer and the phonon-backend-vlc you use are outdated, the current versions 4.6.0 and 0.5.0 are around since 6 months and are about to be replaced by newer ones in a few weeks. I can't reproduce any of your problems, so maybe an update wouldn't hurt: Latest KDE version is 4.8.4, BTW.

Oh and while we are at it: if you are using Kubuntu, I strongly suggest you do not disable pulseaudio which runs by default. There is a good reason for that

How can I get rid off those messages ? I do not want see them at all cost.

As I said before: please update your system, that should solve the issue.

I'm having this problem as well. Interestingly, I've installed 3 different KDE desktop's lately

(most recent to oldest)
1. KDE 4.10 Arch Linux
2. KDE 4.8.5 Slackware
3. KDE ? Arch Linux (the version prior to 4.10, can't recall number).

This problem has only happened for me on the Arch Linux distribution, both 4.10 and their prior main release (4.9??). This message has *never* appeared on the slackware distro.

Currently, with 4.10 I'm using phonon-vlc for backend. In the previous version in Arch, I was using gstreamer. There is no pulseaudio in this version... not sure about the previous one with Arch.

However, I only started noticing these messages after fiddling with settings to get the volume icon to show in the tray. It seems my sound system was confused about wanting to default to my HD Webcamera (it doesn't have audio, only a mic and camera)

Also worth mentioning - I also have an nvidia GeForce 440 (GF 108 chipset) with HDMI audio/video, but I prefer to use my Realtek ALC 882 onboard sound (on an ab9 pro motherboard using hda_intel module). Occassionally I plug in a CMedia USB headset.

Lastly, it seems that everytime I get prompted to forget a device (or two), and I choose to "manage devices", there is a greyed out entry for the device in the phonon control module, as expected, but there is another entry for the same device that seems to be a duplicate, but this entry is active and testable.

Should I just forget them?

I would recommend "forgetting" the devices in this instance. The hardware database has likely got duplicate entries in it for some reason or another (such as changing Phonon backend, or enabling Pulseaudio, which could both cause this to occur).

It is still happening with KDE 4.14.2, running on Debian 8.7, Linux 3.16.0-4-amd64. It happens at least on 2 specific situations:

1 - Clicking to open a text file with kate on dolphin running as root (kdesudo dolphin).
2 - Opening a veracrypt encrypted file container with dolphin directly from the program interface (right-click on device and choosing "Open /media/veracrypt1"). It does not happen if I run dolphin as a regular user and choose the virtual volume from dolphin interface.

Differently from the above colleagues, I still have sound; I can watch an Youtube video, play music and video on VLC Media Player, Dragon Player and other programas. The systray volume/mixer control is still there, although there is no "pulseaudio" process visible in System Activity (Ctrl+Esc).