[SOLVED] Gentoo in VirtualBox

basica · 09-18-2015, 12:19 AM

I just recently installed Gentoo and have managed to get everything up and running, and just noticed the sound doesn't doesn't work. I have been googling this for a solid 4 or 5 hours and trying various things and I have made some progress, but I finally gave up and decided to post here in defeat.

Some peculiar things I did notice (and this may be because I did not have a desktop profile initially) I noticed were that root and my user were not added to the audio group and thus couldn't see my sound card in proc, nor would the alsamixer command work. Now it's showing up under proc/asound and alsamixer works, but no matter how much I fiddle with it (i.e. muting everything but one, and going through each channel, unmuting everything, and so on), it produces no sound when I test it with speaker-test.

It shows up in dmesg, and /proc/asound. I've gone through the wiki's guide on alsa and pulse audio. I've read multiple posts here on the forums and the biggest success I have gotten was getting my sound card to show up by adding root and my user to the audio group. I'm really at a loss as to what to do next.

I'm not sure what info to give that might help y'all help me, but I might start with the following:

List of installed packages:

https://bpaste.net/show/80d176341672

make.conf file

Code:

# These settings were set by the catalyst build script that automatically
# built this stage.
# Please consult /usr/share/portage/config/make.conf.example for a more
# detailed example.
CFLAGS="-O2 -pipe"
CXXFLAGS="${CFLAGS}"
# WARNING: Changing your CHOST is not something that should be done lightly.
# Please consult http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/change-chost.xml before changing.
CHOST="x86_64-pc-linux-gnu"
# These are the USE flags that were used in addition to what is provided by the
# profile used for building.
USE="pulseaudio bindist mmx sse sse2 alsa"
PORTDIR="/usr/portage"
DISTDIR="${PORTDIR}/distfiles"
PKGDIR="${PORTDIR}/packages"
MAKEOPTS="-j2"
VIDEO_CARDS="virtualbox"
INPUT_DEVICES="evdev"
GENTOO_MIRRORS= mirror location here

lspci output:

Code:

lspci | grep -i audio 
00:05.0 Multimedia audio controller: Intel Corporation 82801AA AC'97 Audio Controller (rev 01)

proc/asound/cards output:

Code:

cat /proc/asound/cards
 0 [I82801AAICH    ]: ICH - Intel 82801AA-ICH
                      Intel 82801AA-ICH with AD1980 at irq 21

Anymore info I can provide, please let me know. Thanks for any and all input

basica · 09-18-2015, 11:41 PM

OK, so I did a reinstall and these are a few things to keep in mind when doing a virtual box setup in Gentoo at the moment (Sept 2015) as this may be fixed in the future.

Make sure when building your kernel, you build in support for the AC97 sound card.
Before compiling x and the virtual box video drivers, read this thread. Essentially you'll need to switch from gcc 4.8.5 to 4.9.3, I think it would be best to switch to it soon after chrooting in that way all your packages are under the same gcc version and will probably prevent future issues from occurring.
After everything is installed, master surround is switched off and needs to be switched on. It's the second option when opening the ALSA mixer. It's turned on when the infinity symbol is present. This is what mine looks like.

http://i.imgur.com/ShMZUkAl.png

Once you've done that, you can run the following to make sure it's all working.

Code:

speaker-test -t wav -c 2

Best of luck!