After a few hours of use an error message will pop up in the lower right hand corner of the screen saying,

"Phonon not working. Falling back to HDA Intel AD198x Digital."

At that point all sound from the KDE desktop and all applications stops. BTW, It is falling back from, HDA Intel AD198x Analog.

If I logout out of KDE 4.3.1 and restart the Xserver and re-enter KDE sound re-appears for a few more hours and then the problem starts again.

The problem existed Long before VirtualBox was installed, but I find it interesting that even after the above error message appears saying "Phonon not working..." I can fire up VirtualBox and XP running in a virtual machine has sound. Again, VirtualBox has nothing to do with it as the problem existed before VB was installed.

Thanks.

Some application is likely locking the audio device for its own use. Do you have pulseaudio installed? Also are you using the Xine backend in System Settings > Multimedia.

Thank for your reply.
No, pulseaudio is not installed.
Yes, I'm using the Xine backend.

I tried using the gstreamer backend, but it didn't help and Amarok would not work with gstreamer.

Unfortunately this problem will be difficult to troubleshoot unless you can determine which application causes it to stop working. The "lsof" command on /dev may be able to help.

Is there a way to run KDE 4.xx without Phonon?
From what I've been reading in the message base it hardly seems worthwhile (yet another uncompleted "project" forced on the unsuspecting, unwitting beta testers, i.e., end users).
I un-installed it but KDE wouldn't fire up. It was looking for libphonon.so.4.
Xfce runs fine without Phonon installed.

cwizard wrote:Is there a way to run KDE 4.xx without Phonon?

No.

cwizard wrote:From what I've been reading in the message base it hardly seems worthwhile (yet another uncompleted "project" forced on the unsuspecting, unwitting beta testers, i.e., end users).

How is it uncomplete? People are still adding features to it, but it is feature-complete for most uses in KDE.

cwizard wrote:I un-installed it but KDE wouldn't fire up. It was looking for libphonon.so.4.

Because ~everything doing audio or video in KDE uses it.

cwizard wrote:Xfce runs fine without Phonon installed.

XFCE doesn't have anything to do with KDE.

So, back on topic:
From the errors you get, it seems like a broken ALSA configuration, but I would still like to see the output from lsof.

sandsmark wrote:XFCE doesn't have anything to do with KDE.

Precisely.

sandsmark wrote:So, back on topic:
From the errors you get, it seems like a broken ALSA configuration, but I would still like to see the output from lsof.

lsof is rather a long file. Any particular section you are interested in? Also, I would assume you would want to see it immediately after there is an error? While it is a long file it doesn't look like it is a on going accumulation of data from session to session, but only the current session.

In particular running lsof over /dev/snd and /dev/dsp* will be most helpful. Please do this when both affected by the problem and when not affected. Also, uninstall libflashsupport since that package makes it use Pulseaudio which completely locks the audio device, and prevents others from using it.

Code: Select all

lsof | grep /dev/snd
lsof | grep /dev/dsp