June 2, 2025

Fedora 41 -- Sound Problems

It has been a long time since I have had to troubleshoot linux sound problems. The symptoms are that I use my browser (chrome), go to view a Youtube video and there is no sound.

This started after several events, and I'm not sure which (if any) triggered this. I had my computer off, the case open, and all the cables unplugged. I had the computer off during a thunderstrom. The reboots booted up a new linux kernel.

For the record, this is my desktop x86 machine running Fedora 41.

I check some obvious things. Are the speakers turned on and plugged in? Are they plugged into the right hole in my computer (they are plugged into the lime green hole). When I unplug them I get a nasty buzz, so I know the speakers themselves are functioning in a general way. I check that the youtube mute is not muted (toggling it a few times).

I have an old troubleshooting guide from Fedora 35 days. I got sound to work then by uninstalling and reinstalling packages, as follows: 

su
dnf erase pulseaudio
dnf install wireplumber
dnf install pipewire
exit
systemctl --user enable --now wireplumber
I start off on this and, what do you know, dnf no longer recognizes "erase" as a valid command. I wonder who had this bright idea? Some research reveals that erase and remove used to by synonyms (more or less) and they thought it would be tidy to "just have one way". The bottom line -- use remove.

The remove tells me that pulseaudio is nowhere to be found. This is good. The install tells me that pipewire and wireplumber are already installed, which makes sense. So let's remove them and reinstall them, as per the above. Still broken.

Next I try "dnf install xfce4-pulseaudio-plugin" and it tells me this is installed already. On my panel I see a speaker icon. I can click on it and get a thing to adjust volume. It is already at 45 percent. At the bottom of this dialog is "audio mixer" and when I click on that I get what looks sort of like a mixer. And when I tell a video to play I get a bar graph thing that fluctuates as people are talking. So this looks good, but why no sound?

Sound from my monitor

This has never happened before. There is a little check mark next to GP108 high definition audio. I click this and I hear sound! It sounds bad, compared to what I am used to, and this is because it is coming from my monitor! I never knew it had build in speakers! So this is progress of a sort.

I can play with this thing. It seems to have two output devices. One is "built in analog stereo" (which doesn't work, but should), the other is "GP108 high definition audio", which apparently is done via the HDMI port to my monitor. I can select the other (built in) and see the fluctuating sound level move up next to it -- but I hear no sound.

So, in summary, the Xfce sound widget gives me two choices:

And now it works again

I was playing with the badly designed and confusing Xfce mixer and voila! Sound from the built in stereo begins working when I select Built in Audio. I have no idea what fixed it. I did have my computer entirely apart yesterday again working on hard drives, so maybe I just got the line-out cable plugged in fully. Who knows.

I am running Fedora 41, and the 6.14.9-200 kernel -- my plan was to roll back to previous kernels to see if that fixed my problem, but clearly that won't be necessary.

The discovery that I can play sound through my monitor as a "backup" method (plan B) is a useful discovery. The Xfce mixer is indeed a "mixed" bag given how confusing it it, but with enough trial and error it helps me to get the job done.

I will soon be installing Fedora 42, and we will see if that brings surprises.

Have any comments? Questions? Drop me a line!

Adventures in Computing / tom@mmto.org