Non-descriptive errors
I’m sure the problem was in my initial setup. But errors like this really need to be fixed at some point.
Now I run iceweasel(firefox) in a terminal, because I’ve had issues before and firefox is not the kind of program that well, for some reason not really tries to give errors to it’s users. So instead they just send everything to STDOUT or STDERR.
So I setup a fresh system and noticed sound in flash wasn’t working, and my terminal gave me the following message:
ALSA lib confmisc.c:768:(parse_card) cannot find card '0'
ALSA lib conf.c:3513:(_snd_config_evaluate) function snd_func_card_driver returned error: No such file or directory
ALSA lib confmisc.c:392:(snd_func_concat) error evaluating strings
ALSA lib conf.c:3513:(_snd_config_evaluate) function snd_func_concat returned error: No such file or directory
ALSA lib confmisc.c:1251:(snd_func_refer) error evaluating name
ALSA lib conf.c:3513:(_snd_config_evaluate) function snd_func_refer returned error: No such file or directory
ALSA lib conf.c:3985:(snd_config_expand) Evaluate error: No such file or directory
ALSA lib pcm.c:2144:(snd_pcm_open_noupdate) Unknown PCM default
ALSA lib pcm_hw.c:1240:(_snd_pcm_hw_open) Invalid value for card
Now, what this tells me, is that some function, related to alsa is giving ‘no such file or directory’. Apparently something doesn’t exist. But when I start alsamixer, this works. OSS emulation also seems to work. All the right modules apear to be loaded. So I wonder what could be missing?
Now what I didn’t think of the beginning was that I tested alsa under root, and as soon as I noticed nothing with alsa worked as a user. I began to think about permissions and group membership. Which was indeed the problem, I forgot to add myself to the audio group.
All nice and dandy, and I’ve got sound now everywhere I want it. But the biggest issue remains, nothing was missing. as far as I can see there where no ‘files’ that didn’t exist. Which is what the error message seemed to complain about.
I think firefox or iceweasel has a long way to go as far as ‘user friendlyness’ is concerned. I’m sure their clean install doesn’t have this problem due to the lack of any sound support. But with the current web that doesn’t sound to useful. A good clean and clear way of informing users is a must I think, and it doesn’t apear to be there yet.
</rant>