I just installed alsa-drivers 1.0.22.1 (the latest version to my understanding) on Ubuntu 9.10.
After that I started noticing conflicts between different sound-playback applications. For example, if I watch a Flash video on Firefox, stop it, and then start playing an MP3 file on Totem (a Media Player), I don't hear any sound. Once I close Firefox the music from Totem starts coming out. This never happened before on my Linux system. I'd be very grateful if someone could give me advices!
My /var/log/syslog shows the following whenever this happens:
Feb 7 02:42:36 darsen-laptop pulseaudio[1789]: alsa-sink.c: Error opening PCM device front:0: Device or resource busy Feb 7 02:42:36 darsen-laptop pulseaudio[1789]: alsa-sink.c: Error opening PCM device front:0: Device or resource busy
I also noticed the following message during bootup and was asked to report this issue to ALSA Developers.
Feb 7 02:17:31 darsen-laptop pulseaudio[1789]: ratelimit.c: 179 events suppressed Feb 7 02:17:35 darsen-laptop pulseaudio[1789]: alsa-sink.c: ALSA woke us up to write new data to the device, but there was actually nothing to write! Feb 7 02:17:35 darsen-laptop pulseaudio[1789]: alsa-sink.c: Most likely this is a bug in the ALSA driver 'snd_hda_intel'. Please report this issue to the ALSA developers. Feb 7 02:17:35 darsen-laptop pulseaudio[1789]: alsa-sink.c: We were woken up with POLLOUT set -- however a subsequent snd_pcm_avail() returned 0 or another value < min_avail. Feb 7 02:17:36 darsen-laptop pulseaudio[1789]: ratelimit.c: 182 events suppressed
The good news is my microphone started working with the newly-installed ALSA drivers (It did not work with ALSA v1.0.20)
My Linux kernel version is 2.6.31-19.general. I installed it using the Ubuntu Package Manager. On the other hand the ALSA driver was compiled from source code. ALSA was configured with the following options sudo ./configure -with-kernel=/usr/src/linux-headers-`uname -r` --with-cards=hda-intel
"lspci -v" shows the following
00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) HD Audio Controller (rev 03) Subsystem: Dell Device 02cf Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 31 Memory at f6afc000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=16K] Capabilities: <access denied> Kernel driver in use: HDA Intel Kernel modules: snd-hda-intel
I confirmed that the correct version of driver was loaded into the kernel by typing "cat /proc/asound/version":
Advanced Linux Sound Architecture Driver Version 1.0.22.1. Compiled on Feb 7 2010 for kernel 2.6.31-19-generic (SMP).
Thanks, Darsen