Sound Issue in Ubuntu 10.10 Beta

This morning when logging in to my newly-upgraded-to-Ubuntu-10.10 laptop, sound was not working. It appears that the solution was very simple: my user was not authorised to use audio devices. I don't know why it was disabled as it had always worked fine before but it's very easy to solve so if you have the same problem check that first. To resolve it, go to System → Administration → Users and Groups, select your user, click on the Advanced Settings button, enter your password, click the User Privileges tab and make sure the Use audio devices box is checked. While you're at it, do the same for the other users on your system.

User Settings dialogue

If that doesn't work, there is a handy wiki page on debugging sound problems.

Skype Sound Issues

Skype is not available in the Ubuntu repositories but you can get hold of it (and a few other things) through medibuntu. However, it looks like that version of Skype has a problem with sound on Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex, as detailed in this bug report. The workaround suggested in the discussion that consists in killing pulseaudio before launching Skype works for me so that's good news. Even better news, it looks like the problem is fully sorted in Ubuntu 9.04, which is currently in beta. So, until then, I will use the workaround.

One lesson to learn from this though, is that if you ever have a problem with a piece of software on Linux, a good practice is to start that software from the command line: the output in the terminal window is invaluable for developers and maintainers to understand the problem and is a good place to start in order to find a solution to it. Quite often, just putting the error message in Google will return a number of articles and bug reports on that exact problem.