This will be a quick post to outline a fix for something that we ran into this afternoon. My buddy herlo recently upgraded to Edgy and the sound had issues working after completion. After doing some digging we found a solution to the problem so I thought I would share this with the rest of you. This solution was found at the Kubuntu Forums.
This solution is to verify your user account is authorized to use sound (odd, I know, but its wise to check):
adduser [user] audio
Another solution that you can try is found at the Ubuntu Guide.
I hope either of these help anyone with audio trouble. They are rare–I haven’t had trouble with audio–but they happen. Enjoy!
Update: A comment has pointed out that I made an error in my original syntax for adding the user. I apologize if it caused trouble for anyone. The appropriate command is now listed above and offending command removed. Also, if you’ve made changes using the previous command you may want to use this command to see what changes were made and recover accordingly as it removed the user from groups instead of adding. My apologies.:
sudo diff /etc/group /etc/group-
(this will work as long as no additional changes have been made.)
Watch out, on some Linux distros usermod -G will remove you from your current secondary group. I don’t have an Ubuntu box handy, but here’s what it’d look like:
# id sjansen
uid=500(sjansen) gid=500(sjansen) groups=500(sjansen),10(wheel)
# usermod -G audio sjansen
# id sjansen
uid=500(sjansen) gid=500(sjansen) groups=500(sjansen),42(audio)
You should really be careful with what you go out there posting.
Your “advice” just removed me from all groups but “sound”.
Taking into account that you’re actually part of Planet Ubuntu, you should double check this kind of advice before posting it.
Ricardo – I apologize for the error. I have emailed you instructions for recovering the changes and updated the post.
No big harm done, mate 🙂
I may have sounded harsher than I wanted to, as it was easily solved.
Kudos for the prompt correction and the overall recognition that hey!, you’re only human! Happens to everyone.
Keep up the great work.
the audio issue isn’t rare at all if you plan to install ubuntu on your company machines using LDAP for centralizing auth.
I just figure out 2 days ago how to solve this:
smbldap-addgroup audio
then add the memeberUid attrbute for the members.
also, we need to add the video, cdrom and plugdev to LDAP groups.
to note that this issue doesn’t happen with MacOSX and LDAP accounts.
Cheers
I solve this problem with a very simple script. Remember: I don’t know if it always work. This script will add an user to all groups of another user. You can run it on shell directly:
for g in `grep baseUser /etc/group | cut -f 1 -d:`; do adduser newUser $g; done
baseUser: groups from this user will be copied.
newUser: this user will be added for all groups copied from baseUser