How do I enable sound in Fedora 17?

Question

I did a minimal install of Fedora 17 some months ago and only until today did I try playing some audio with it only to find out that sound is not working.

How do I get the sound to work on Fedora 17?

My current setup is only using Xmonad as window manager, no desktop environment. So I would prefer the CLI way of installing/troubleshooting this.

Answer 1

I scoured the web, following every suggestion I could find to get integrated Intel HDA audio to work under Fedora 17. Nothing worked until I stumbled across this little gem:

Add your user to the 'audio' group, then reboot

From a shell prompt:

       sudo usermod -a -G audio yourUserName

After that, all I had to do was go to the Mixer control panel and select 'Playback: Internal Audio Analog Stereo (PulseAudio Mixer)'.

Answer 2

To begin debugging this:

Install the alsa-utils and sox packages.

yum install alsa-utils sox

Now attempt to play a sample sound.

play /usr/share/sounds/alsa/Front_Center.wav

Take note of any error messages.

If you get no sound from the play command, then edit your question and pastebin the output from:

dmesg | egrep -i "(alsa|sound)"

Answer 3

Also note that i have found some problems with sound in my fedora. My problem was that in sound settings the output was set to HDMI. Just do a quick check to see if that's your problem. If so, disable HDMI.

Antonis Kalou.