Audio issue - System not playing system sounds with one of the users

padota1663 · 2024-09-21 15:53

Hi everyone, as per the title I'm having a weird and puzzling issue since two months ago, which started after the combination of these three events:

- A main hard disk corruption event (it was dieing suddenly according to GSmartControl, and the / partition was remounted RO by the system, so I rushed everything on a functioning drive with a live install of Clonezilla)
- After moving successfully the installation to a healthy drive, GRUB was broken and I had to repair it (Clonezilla forced me to delete and rewrite a part of my partition table, because it wouldn't recognize it and would quit the cloning to the new drive if I refused to alter it), which I managed to do successfully, thanks God
- I started having various system crashes some days after moving everything to the healthy drive (which were due to malformed BOINC project workunits crashing the system, or by RAM exhaustion because the machine only has 4 GBs of RAM, which was either due to BOINC itself or by too many / too heavy Firefox tabs open, altogether with BOINC running in the background, which, depending on the workunits being processed, sometimes is quite memory hogging), unfortunately during every occurrence the system became slowly but completely unresponsive in a matter of a minute or two, to the point it even completely stopped logging to /var/log/syslog, instead filling it with a ton of ^@ characters immediately after it logged the event of the BOINC workunit crashing (if the crash was due to BOINC and not to RAM exhaustion), and the system logs were rotated since then, so I'm unable to dig out some more evidence.

After some crashes my user account stopped playing system sounds altogether, but every other kind of audio or sound plays just right, even NoMachine Server installed on the PC transmits audio normally to remote clients (both Windows and Linux) connecting to the PC, obviously excluding system sounds as already said.

I followed the tutorial from the Trinity DE website for troubleshooting system sounds issues, but nothing at all changed.

So I decided searching in the forum where I found a post from another user with sound issues which in turn was pointing to the Q4OS audio troubleshooting guide but following the guide did not produce any positive result.

I then decided to give a shot at creating a brand new user account to rule out the possibility of the issue being arosen from a user config issue due to some config file in my home folder being corrupt (my Dolphin File Manager config files were broken and I managed to fix them successfully by hand, importing them from a second PC with Q4OS on board) and guess what? With the new user account the system sounds are back, alive and kicking!

Being this test successful I checked every possible system config in the control panel related to system sounds, comparing every single setting to both the new user account and to the other PC with Q4OS (just like I did to fix Dolphin) but everything was aligned between every user account and every PC.

Yeah I know, I can move everything to the new user which has working system sounds, the point is that I don't want to, cause it'll take quite a load of time and effort, so I'm asking, are there config files that can be moved to the old user to restore system sounds functionality, just like I did to fix Dolphin, or I'm left with no other option other than moving everything to a new user account?

If the output of inxi -F or of lshw is needed, or if screenshots of pavucontrol / KMix are needed, can you please tell me how to attach files or screenshots?

Thanks

padota1663 · 2024-10-01 17:31

Hello, can someone help me please?

hchiper · 2024-10-02 08:56

Unfortunately, I can't answer your question about relevant config files.

I think that the problems you are having now with your new drive are due to the fact that you cloned the image of your old faulty drive and that you may discover other problems over time.

In my opinion, a totally clean solution would be not to move your data to another user account but to make a fresh install of the whole system. This way you'll at least start with a clean system, although this will not guarantee that the user data you'll restore later will be clean too. If you have doubts on some user configuration files, don't restore them.

I know it is a lot of work but it is the price to pay for your peace of mind in the future.

padota1663 · 2024-10-07 16:08

Hi hchiper,

thanks for the answer, I already knew a fresh install is the best thing to do in cases like mine, I just wanted to avoid all the hassle that it took me to configure everything to suit my needs, but it seems like I'll have to jump again on this ship... sigh.

I really hoped there could've been a way to avoid starting everything from scratch again, but you are right, I'll be likely facing other issues over time, cause I don't know if there are other corrupt config files.

Thanks again

hchiper · 2024-10-07 21:45

For the future, a first thing you might consider to use is "timeshift" to make snapshots of your system (similar to Windows Restore points). It is not advised to use it to backup your home directory. For your data, use instead a dedicated backup tool. There is on in Plasma (go to System Configuration, you will see a backup tool).
Think also that when you'll want to upgrade Q4OS from one major version to the next one you'll need to make a fresh install (that's at least what is advised). Therefore it could be worth having your user folder on a separate partition that will not be overwritten by a fresh install.

padota1663 · 2024-11-24 15:52

hchiper wrote:

For the future, a first thing you might consider to use is "timeshift" to make snapshots of your system (similar to Windows Restore points). It is not advised to use it to backup your home directory. For your data, use instead a dedicated backup tool. There is on in Plasma (go to System Configuration, you will see a backup tool).
Think also that when you'll want to upgrade Q4OS from one major version to the next one you'll need to make a fresh install (that's at least what is advised). Therefore it could be worth having your user folder on a separate partition that will not be overwritten by a fresh install.

Hi hcipher,

sorry for the late reply, life has been a rollercoaster lately... I already tried to fiddle with Timeshift some months ago, and guess what? I was trying to backup my home folder too (against the best practice), and this was causing me headaches, as I have two other disks mounted under the Downloads folder of my home, each one on a dedicated subfolder, where I move stuff that I download, and this was causing Timeshift to loop through these folders, as the backup destination folder was on one of these secondary drives (IIRC, Timeshift specifically imposes to store the backups / snapshots on a different drive) and Timeshift ignored the exclusion of the two folders I mounted these drives to, really dunno why, so I left it alone.

Guess I'll give it a second try, maybe on a test VM first.

Thanks anyways for suggesting it; as per the backup tool on Plasma, sorry but I'm using Trinity, so I'll look around for some other backup tool; obviously if you have suggestions they'll be gladly welcome.

bin · 2024-11-25 10:08

Timeshift for the OS.
Backintime for your /home.

padota1663 · 2024-11-25 23:02

Hi bin,

many many thanks for the suggestion, I just tested Back In Time and it worked wonders with my home folder, it respected the exclusion I set for my /home/a/Scaricati/sdc folder (where the /dev/sdc1 partition is mounted, which is where I chose to store backups) while backing up all the rest of the /home/a folder.

I have two questions for you now: first, I noticed that there are two options on the Trinity menu for launching Back In Time, one as regular user and one as root:

backintime

Do you know if is it possible to run it as root and back up the whole PC, maybe excluding the /home folder and backing that up as regular user, if backing it up as root is found to cause issues? I'd like to ditch Timeshift if possible, as it only caused me headaches up until now (maybe I'm wrongdoing something, if someone helps me out on that I'll gladly reconsider my judice).

Second, do you (or someone else) maybe know why Timeshift doesn't give a damn about filters / exclusions? I set it up exactly like I did with Back In Time, telling him not to rsync the /home/a/Scaricati/sdc folder and it acted like the exclusion wasn't there at all (I marked with the red arrow the exclusion I made):

timeshift

Thanks again anyways for suggesting Back In Time, I just set up a backup job of the home folder and did the first run.

Last edited by padota1663 (2025-01-10 02:57)

bin · 2024-11-26 15:56

BIT (root) allows you to back up files to which your user account does not have access. For this you need root access. It's just a backup tool - I don't think I would want to try to do a system restore with it. Actually I never bother that stuff. If I break it I just re-install as by then it's probably a mess anyway.....
Timeshift - just don't point it at your /home folder - that's not what it does, it's a system backup and restore tool.

padota1663 · 2024-12-04 21:32

Hi bin,

thanks for the suggestions, I'll use the two tools as you suggested, TS for everything except /home and BIT for my /home.

Regards

Q4OS Forum

#1 2024-09-21 15:53

Audio issue - System not playing system sounds with one of the users

#2 2024-10-01 17:31

Re: Audio issue - System not playing system sounds with one of the users

#3 2024-10-02 08:56

Re: Audio issue - System not playing system sounds with one of the users

#4 2024-10-07 16:08

Re: Audio issue - System not playing system sounds with one of the users

#5 2024-10-07 21:45

Re: Audio issue - System not playing system sounds with one of the users

#6 2024-11-24 15:52

Re: Audio issue - System not playing system sounds with one of the users

#7 2024-11-25 10:08

Re: Audio issue - System not playing system sounds with one of the users

#8 2024-11-25 23:02

Re: Audio issue - System not playing system sounds with one of the users

#9 2024-11-26 15:56

Re: Audio issue - System not playing system sounds with one of the users

#10 2024-12-04 21:32

Re: Audio issue - System not playing system sounds with one of the users

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