Following a final laptop crash, I invested in a “new” Dell Vostro 5510 and installed Debian 12 in view of the comments on this Forum about Ubuntu.
The installation went OK but I find that I have no audio facility. Well almost. There is built-in s/w called “Sound Recorder” to record sound via the built-in microphone that worked once, and not again, but VLC and Trueconf conferencing s/w show sound going to a “dummy output” and recording device as “None”.
Pulse Audio is not listed in the menu so I tried to install it:
keith@dv5510:~$ sudo apt install pulseaudio -y
Reading package lists… Done
Building dependency tree… Done
Reading state information… Done
pulseaudio is already the newest version (16.1+dfsg1-2+b1).
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 446 not upgraded.
keith@dv5510:~$ pulseaudio
E: [pulseaudio] pid.c: Daemon already running.
E: [pulseaudio] main.c: pa_pid_file_create() failed.
keith@dv5510:~$
So it looks like it’s there somewhere but a missing file may be preventing it from manifesting itself. Sudo update & upgrade did upgrade the 446 waiting files, but after a reboot there is still no sound and no PulseAudio listed in the menu.
Advice would be very welcome.
[EDIT]
Looks like it’s a known problem with Debian 12 using pipewire and pulsaudio. I don’t understand the various web pages debating this but will persevere.
Had a look at AlsaMixer. It’s not intuitive but looks to be set up OK.
Next action is to try various OSs via the live USB to check what works with audio.
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