Totem silent in VMware Player after Koala upgrade

[shanen (Shannon Jacobs)]

Binary package hint: totem

My main audio use of Ubuntu was for streaming MP3 audio, and it's been working fine (for perhaps a year or two on this machine) until the Koala upgrade. It seems to be attempting to do something, but there's no sound and I can't find any way to get sound out of it (so far). I can say that removing pulseaudio did not work in my case. (Sorry, not sure where that workaround was recommended, but I'm pretty sure I've completely undone it, including the reinstall of ubuntu-desktop.)

ProblemType: Bug
Architecture: i386
Date: Sun Nov 8 16:15:15 2009
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 9.10
ExecutablePath: /usr/bin/totem
LiveMediaBuild: Ubuntu 8.04 "Hardy Heron" - Release i386 (20080423)
Package: totem 2.28.1-0ubuntu4
ProcEnviron:
 LANGUAGE=en_US.UTF-8
 LANG=en_US.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.31-14.48-generic
SourcePackage: totem
Uname: Linux 2.6.31-14-generic i686
XsessionErrors:
 (gnome-settings-daemon:1518): GLib-CRITICAL **: g_propagate_error: assertion `src != NULL' failed
 (gnome-settings-daemon:1518): GLib-CRITICAL **: g_propagate_error: assertion `src != NULL' failed
 (nautilus:1573): Eel-CRITICAL **: eel_preferences_get_boolean: assertion `preferences_is_initialized ()' failed
 (polkit-gnome-authentication-agent-1:1592): GLib-CRITICAL **: g_once_init_leave: assertion `initialization_value != 0' failed
 (gnome-panel:1572): Gdk-WARNING **: /build/buildd/gtk+2.0-2.18.3/gdk/x11/gdkdrawable-x11.c:952 drawable is not a pixmap or window

[Pedro Villavicencio (pedro)]

do you get sound with another application like mplayer, rhythmbox, vlc, etc ?

[shanen (Shannon Jacobs) (shanen)]

Sorry I'm slow getting back to you on this. I sort of hoped it was just the usual glitches (even though they're supposed to be ready to release the software when they release it)... However, it appears the sound-related problems are much more serious than I understood at the time, and much more widespread.

With regards to your specific question, I can respond that all of the sound-related applications are apparently unable to work with the sound card. Probably as a result of one of the recent upgrades, it has started emitting a few clicks from time to time, but there is no sound on a machine that worked fine until the Koala upgrade. I wasn't using any of the other sound applications on that machine, so it took me a while to figure out what to test and how.

Since then I've tried the live Koala CD and a Koala upgrade on a different machine. In both cases the sound is not working. These were NOT using VMware, but actual hardware. The first machine with the VMware Player is a Lenovo X61, and the other machine is a Sharp laptop. The Sharp has always had a number of minor peculiarities, but has basically worked well enough under earlier releases of Ubuntu, and there has never been any problem with the sound card (on either machine, as far as I can recall).

At this point my feelings towards Ubuntu are declining pretty steeply. I don't have a lot of spare time that I want to spend trying to debug problems with the OS... I regard Microsoft or Apple as clutching evils, but I don't feel like Ubuntu is offering much of an option these days. I guess I'll continue struggling with Ubuntu for a while, but I sure can't recommend it based on my experiences with the last few releases... I think I had some trouble with my first one, too, but that was a long time ago and I figured it was just the normal learning curve, but these kinds of crippling problems are just not going to work...

*sigh* I want to close on a constructive note, so I'll include a link to the following alternative mechanism for funding the production of better open source software, but I'm feeling pretty discouraged about all of this stuff right now. I really hate using Microsoft garbage.

http://metablog-shanen.blogspot.com/2009/11/economics-of-small-donors-reverse.html

[Omer Akram (om26er)]

thanks for your bug report and sorry for not getting back to you sooner. If you have a production system it is rather recommended for the user to not upgrade on every ubuntu release. LTS releases on the other hand are for those people who want system to be stable. also its preferred you upgrade to the LTS atleast after a month of its release so that if there are any critical regressions found by people they get fixed in updates. the development of ubuntu is incremental and on the LTS releases there are relatively less changes as compared to normal releases. I am closing this bug since I believe the issue has been fixed in Ubuntu-10.04. Sorry again for not getting back to you sooner.