2023-03-25


Two systems that should be the same (RedHat Enterprise 9.1 copies), on two Dell laptops.  


Almalinux 9.1 on Dell Latitude E7450 
lspci -v 
  Audio device: Intel Corporation Wildcat Point-LP High Definition Audio Controller (rev 03)
  Subsystem: Dell Device 062e
  Kernel driver in use: snd_hda_intel
  Kernel modules: snd_hda_intel
This worked fine after installation. 
It used the new default sound-server 'pipewire'. 
With no further adjustment after installation, and with mplayer installed from rpmfusion, 
it worked to use any of mplayer's audio outputs: -ao pulse , -ao alsa , -ao jack .
  

Springdale 9.1 on Dell Latitude 7840 
lspci -v
 Audio device: Intel Corporation Sunrise Point-LP HD Audio (rev 21)
 Subsystem: Dell Device 07a0
 Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 32, IRQ 137
 Kernel driver in use: snd_hda_intel
 Kernel modules: snd_hda_intel, snd_soc_skl
On this one, despite two installations (first minimal followed by adding packages, then full 'workstation'), 
it didn't work.  The pipewire and pipewire-pulse processes were running, but no player (mplayer with 
different outputs, and vlc, and firefox video-player) would move.  "alsamixer" when switching to another 
'device' did show a suitable device. 
 

Since pipewire seems to be such a nice idea (allowing any of the other outputs to work, as mentioned above for mplayer), it was with reluctance that a workaround was tried: trying to shift over to the older pulseaudio (which is still supported as an alternative in RHEL9). 
The following recipe worked, although it's a bit silly that every user needs to run the systemctl --user command in order to get it working. 


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https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/89422   taken 2023-03-25

"This article provides steps to remove pipewire-pulseaudio and install pulseaudio which can have issues with composite devices.
By default, the RHEL 9 distribution uses pipewire-pulseaudio instead of pulseaudio. Pipewire-pulseaudio can have issues with composite devices.
To accurately detect composite devices, the Horizon Client endpoint should be configured to use pulseaudio instead of pipewire-pulseaudio."


# dnf swap --allowerasing pipewire-pulseaudio pulseaudio

# reboot

# mkdir -p /etc/pulse/default.pa.d


$ systemctl --user enable pulseaudio

$ systemctl --user start pulseaudio
  or
$ pulseaudio --start


If pulseaudio is not running, you will see these issues:
    Under system settings > sound, all device fields will be blank
    No sound when audio is played
    Horizon Client Linux crashes on startup
    running the command “pactl info” will fail with the error message “failed to connect”
In which case, you should verify that the systemctl commands succeeded:
systemctl list-units --all


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