Comment 242 for bug 355155

Somehow I overcame the problem.

I was (and I am practically) still having freezes, when I wanted to test something. I just wanted to see what happens to the sound, when a freeze occur. So I installed vlc, and was listening to music every day. I made sure that music never stops, even when I was away from keyboard. But no luck, no freeze occured.

I was thinking that might have been a lucky day. So I was testing this out 2-3 days in a row, and I had no freeze at all. Then when I stopped vlc for a moment (changing playlist) the system froze. I thought that might have been unlucky sequence of events, so back to testing. No freeze again.

So I thought maybe this might be sound related (at least in my case). I must admit, when I installed Jaunty sound didn't work well. I could listen to music somehow, but there were no system sounds, only the warning sound, but that also came from the speaker of my motherboard (even when thunderbird checked for emails).

Anyway, I visited Realtek's site, downloaded the latest alsa driver, installed it. Next time I booted, everything worked. System sounds, music and video playback, youtube, etc.

Now I have found a better music player (mpd), which uses less resources (and fits more to my problem). But still, there were no freezes. Then once, when I was changing music in Sonata (client for mpd) I got a freeze again. But not while listening to music.

So far, I've got this system working for over a month now. I don't say, that it's a solution, but hey, if I can use Ubuntu I'm okay with it. I'm bound to listen to music all day? I don't care, I just need a bigger jukebox.

To be precise, I still have sound problems. Sometimes alsa crashes while playing music or watching a video. Sometimes I need to restart it, sometimes I have to reinstall it. But even if I have to do that, I'm still happy using Jaunty instead of XP (20 second boot time, I love this os). It's faster reinstalling alsa, rebooting, than using windows every day (slow boot, lots of programs to load, etc.). Anyway, if anybody experiencing the same thing as I did try listening music every day. And if anybody knows the solution to my sound problem, please contact me.

By the way @bryncoles: no, compiz is not the culprit (in my case). When I first wanted to get rid of the problem I tried everything: no update, no drivers installed, no additional programs installed, and the combinations of these three. But didn't worked for me. I even tried Kubuntu, but was still freezing (before installing any updates of softwares). Maybe I should have give a try to Mint, but now the problem is gone (or at least it's on vacation), I don't want to reinstall again.