I know I shouldn't dare to challenge the almighty Linux GOD as he will likely unleash his wrath on me as he's been prone to do with other PLUG members in the past and recently with his vitriolic rant of Ubuntu.
IMHO, I've found the 1st steps in troubleshooting hardware problems are: 1. Software detection of the hardware. Firstly at the OS layer and then secondly at the application layer. 1A. The correct driver is installed. 1B. If there are multiple devices such as speakers, microphones, printers, etc checking which device is selected and/or set to the default. But the real step #1 is correctly identifying the problem. Rich's thread started with a video con call test that resulted in only hearing audio through the left channel and then went from there to webcam mic vs headset mic detection in pulseaudio, web browsers, Jitsi and screen sharing in Jitsi. Did I miss any other problems??? This is a community forum. Everyone has an opinion and also everyone has an opportunity to participate, learn and get things wrong along the way. And quite honestly, a big part of troubleshooting is being able to separate the wheat from the chaff that one is going to find when soliciting help on the Internet or even from a technical support person. On Thu, Jun 4, 2020 at 1:42 PM Ben Koenig <[email protected]> wrote: > > On 6/4/20 11:45 AM, Rich Shepard wrote: > > On Wed, 3 Jun 2020, Ben Koenig wrote: > > > >> Sounds good, tomorrow then. For now I would forget about the app and > >> verify basic functionality and make sure that it persists across > >> reboots. > > > > Ben, > > > > Are you suggesting rebooting the host? > > > >> If that audio detection meter isn't moving, literally nothing else > >> matters. I don't recall anyone else suggesting that as a troubleshooting > >> step even though it should always be your goto for these kinds of > >> issues. > > > > "that"? Rebooting? Rich > > _______________________________________________ > > PLUG mailing list > > [email protected] > > http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug > > > > Step 1 for microphone troubleshooting is to verify that something is > being picked up. The Volume meter in pavucontrol will indicate that it > hears something, whether that be your voice, ceiling fan or ambient > static from a poorly configured jack. > > > Step 2 is to to verify that the audio picked up by the mic is correct. > Sometimes you see activity in the meter that is not what it should be. > e.g. background static from an unconnected audio device. > > > While running through steps 1 and 2, rebooting is a valuable tool to > verify that everything is loaded to a known good state. There are race > conditions involved with using pulseaudio. It has to load after the alsa > drivers, and if it crashes it has a tendency to auto restart as a > different process. By rebooting the host, you can be sure that > everything is loaded and linked together in the correct order, with the > correct permissions. > > > Are we still on for this afternoon? I want to pull this conversation off > of email entirely. Everyone is throwing ideas at you with no > coordination or focus. Some would even say that the definition of > insanity is doing the same thing and expecting different results. I'm > seeing over 25 emails from at least 7 different people and very little > meaningful progress. Maybe it's time to consider a different angle of > attack for this problem? > > > My offer of a quick web meeting for 5:30pm (or maybe even a phone call) > this afternoon still stands. I'm not going to offer further > troubleshooting advice for this issue via the PLUG list because someone > is just going to step all over it. > > -Ben > > _______________________________________________ > PLUG mailing list > [email protected] > http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug > _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list [email protected] http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
