sound inaudible in X; audible from TTY

[mythomaniac]

Binary package hint: consolekit

Release: Ubuntu karmic (development branch) 9.10

Package Version: Installed: 0.3.1-0ubuntu2
                             Candidate: 0.3.1-0ubuntu2
                             Version table:
                            *** 0.3.1-0ubuntu2 0
                                     500 http://us.archive.ubuntu.com karmic/main Packages
                                     100 /var/lib/dpkg/status

Expectation:

After having installed Xorg, AwesomeWM, Pulseaudio, Alsa, their dependencies and recommended packages it was assumed that sound would have worked in Xorg.

What occurred:

There is no audio in Xorg, though from any TTY sound does work. In fact while playing a sound file, or a video (within firefox) within Xorg I need to log into a TTY (example, ctrl+alt+f2) to hear the sound of either. Yet when I switch back to Xorg (ctrl+alt+f7) sound vanishes.

Looking deeper into the issue revealed that alsamixer works and gives the full options of my sound card, but while in Xorg and through a virtual terminal alsamixer states, "alsamixer: function snd_ctl_open failed for default: No such file or directory".

As well when issuing the command "aplay -l" from TTY my sound card is listed as both playback device and sub device, but while in Xorg under a virtual terminal aplay states, "aplay: device_list:233: no soundcards found...".

Going ever deeper to solve the issue an strace was done from both TTY (http://pastebin.com/m7d7643b7) and from within a virtual console from Xorg (http://pastebin.com/m468d16cb).

What was shown was that while in Xorg permission to "/dev/snd/controlC0" was denied, but while from a TTY it was not.

If the pastebin.com postings disappear or are changed I will provide an attachment with both results, and labeled accordingly as well.

As one can see this is for sure a bug and one that should be fixed. For it is essential to have sound working for those users who use Ubuntu that wish not to use Gnome, Kde, or Xfce.

I would like to thank DanaG for helping track down this problem and maco for helping figure out how to file a bug report (both can be found the #ubuntu+1 channel on Freenode).

ProblemType: Bug
Architecture: amd64
Date: Tue Sep 29 00:30:39 2009
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 9.10
NonfreeKernelModules: nvidia
Package: consolekit 0.3.1-0ubuntu2
ProcEnviron:
 LANG=en_US.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.31-11.36-generic
SourcePackage: consolekit
Uname: Linux 2.6.31-11-generic x86_64