Muted Sound Card

Knowledgebase

Symptom

Despite having been properly set up according to YaST, your sound card does not produce any sound. The problem can be temporarily solved by reconfiguring your sound card, but arises again as soon as the system is restarted.

Cause

ALSA volume settings are overwritten by the tools in the package kdemultimedia3-mixer when KDE starts.

Solution

Disable KDE's mixer support and use sound mixers for the ALSA sound system only (e.g., kamix). For this purpose, proceed as follows:

Make sure all mixer applications have been unloaded. If not, you should see a speaker icon on the tray beside the clock in the lower right corner. In this case, right-click it and select Quit from the context menu.
If the question [Should KAMix start automatically immediately after you log in?] pops up when closing the mixer, confirm with Yes and skip to steps 13 and 14 of these instructions.
Start the YaST Control Center and select Software -> Install and Remove Software.
Search for "kdemultimedia".
Right-click the package kdemultimedia3-mixer then select Delete from menu that opens.
Press Accept in the lower right corner.
Finish the YaST Control Center.
Open a console (e.g., press [Alt]+[F2] and run the command konsole.
Enter the command su - in the console.
Enter the administrator's (root) password when prompted to do so. No characters (asterisk or similar) are displayed when typing it.
Execute the following commands in the given order:
- rcalsasound stop
- rm /etc/asound.state
- rcalsasound start
- alsactl store
Log the root user out of the console by pressing [Ctrl]+[D].
Enter the command kamix &.
Confirm the pop-up message [KDEInit could not start "CheckHardware".].
Close the console by pressing [Ctrl]+[D].

Disclaimer

The origin of this information may be internal or external to Novell. While Novell makes all reasonable efforts to verify this information, Novell does not make explicit or implied claims to its validity.