Strange behaviours with sound settings and mounting drives

[dreamer]

@m_pav
I opened the case of my PC and I didn't find any bad capacitors. The flat side of all cylinders were truly flat. None of them bulged, not even a little bit.
And, in my case, there was no cross × on the capacitors, but a T.

To be honest, I would be surprised if my problem was hardware related, because Windows 10 on this same PC plays audio normally, without any interruptions. If Windows 10 can do it, then the hardware is capable of playing sound uninterrupted. Then the problem must be with the software.

MX-23 is a pretty unique system because it can boot using two different init/service systems. I see in your Quick System Info that you booted default SysVinit. Since your hardware seems Ok running Windows 10, why not test MX Linux with systemd. In GRUB choose Advanced and boot a kernel in systemd mode.

[atomick]

Ghosts in the Machine: Wow nice find and good purchase. 1st off your running Windows-10 and dual booted with MX-Linux. Versions do not matter its Linux. Give away to being mis-lead.
Its running and its a work horse and your experiencing Ghosted issue with linux booted.

Capacitors should not be mentioned regardless its a RED-Herring, collusion to the issue. If its dead in its tracks and your seeing Blue Smoke ( highly toxic don't ever breath, fan this away immediately ) These described E-type or X-stamped Topped Capacitors are a new but old. The reason for the stamp is "If a capacitor where? and that is Where to pop by
"Brown Outs, Hydro Surges, Metal Staple dropped onto a live mother board or ... would cause a short and usually the circuits of proximity containing any like would/could pop and these types expand or Bubble expand when blown
"Easy to Identify for a trouble shooter" No worry can leave that one alone.

Sound issues, suggest to add your self user name to sound Group IDs. as in open a Terminal Shell like - Xfce4-terminal tap enter couple times see your focus is in this terminal.
add your user name to these groups like

Code: Select all

 sudo usermod -aG audio johndoe 
sudo usermod -aG video johndoe
sudo usermod -aG Pipewire johndoe 

See "if" that may make any glitch changes experienced. Another method Possibly as simple would be click the MX-Application Start select MX-Tools , right there top section is " User Manager "
top right tab is "Group Membership" simple check mark the groups you believe are associated to Video/Audio / Pipewire.
these are all there once click and apply your sudo passwd is required to finalize the change.

if by chance still in your terminal you can also simply tap the enter key couple times just to make habitually sure your operating in this Window then type clear followed by id
id will show all your user group id associations set at install or user account creation. single them out by another command.

Code: Select all

 id | egrep -e "audio|video|pipewire" 

here you may see color selected response on these 3 checks along with the rest of group memberships. See how this may change "Ghost in the Machine"
also view /var/log/syslog and or dmesg also contained in the /var/log this is Device Messaging and here check for Retries or errors detecting devices "especially audio type devices"

[markwiering]

@m_pav
I opened the case of my PC and I didn't find any bad capacitors. The flat side of all cylinders were truly flat. None of them bulged, not even a little bit.
And, in my case, there was no cross × on the capacitors, but a T.

To be honest, I would be surprised if my problem was hardware related, because Windows 10 on this same PC plays audio normally, without any interruptions. If Windows 10 can do it, then the hardware is capable of playing sound uninterrupted. Then the problem must be with the software.

MX-23 is a pretty unique system because it can boot using two different init/service systems. I see in your Quick System Info that you booted default SysVinit. Since your hardware seems Ok running Windows 10, why not test MX Linux with systemd. In GRUB choose Advanced and boot a kernel in systemd mode.

Thank you for the suggestion. I will try this!
I would be surprised if this solved the problem, but I will give it a shot.

Thank you, @atomick!
I will try your steps as soon as I am back behind that computer.

[dreamer]

Thank you for the suggestion. I will try this!
I would be surprised if this solved the problem, but I will give it a shot.

Also create a new user in MX User Manager and see if that user has the same problems. Maybe the config files in the home folder of your current user are corrupt in some way.

[j2mcgreg]

I think that you should try an earlier kernel IE one that was current to when your machine was made : either the AntiX 5.10 or the 4.19. Both are available via MXPI.

[m_pav]

If Windows 10 can do it, then the hardware is capable of playing sound uninterrupted. Then the problem must be with the software.

That's a reasonable assumption and it may even be the right one, but we're not finished with the hardware yet. I fix a lot of computers and you'd be surprised to see just how many issues are related to ageing hardware. The next check is your RAM. I see you have 8GB installed and with the age, my reckoning is that's likely to be 2x 4GB, or at a stretch, 4 x 2GB.

My next suggestion is you do a memtest which you can find at the grub screen. This will test each module independently because it runs linearly, so if it finds any faults above the value of your first module, then the fault will be with the next module and so on till it completes, but, you can save some time by simply looking at the RAM modules for yourself to see if they're all of the same type. The ideal scenario is when all modules look identical and appear to be from the same batch. Memory mappings and timings can produce some random faults and mismatched memory modules can be a huge contributor towards machine instability. Memory speed and timings are critical.

I have an old Sony VAIO PC that I truly can not give away. It's got an excellent screen, probably the best thing about it, but, it is very slow to boot, a fresh Windows 10 install with all drivers will take 2M30s to arrive at the Desktop and load a web page with an auto-login and 1M36s to shut down, and enabling fast startup only makes a few seconds difference. By comparison, MX-23.5 KDE takes 31s from cold boot to arrive at the same point, and shutdown is under 10s. However, it was not always this way.

I tried to make a LibreOffice Impress presentation on the machine using MX and discovered the longer I spend in the app, the worse it gets. The machine passes all tests with flying colours, but it is simply not a stable machine at all, not in Windows, nor in MX, and for its age, it has not done that many hours of operational time. I have a firm belief it's the processor in the machine. This machine gets random KDE errors for no reason whatsoever, things just seem to break through regular use, so I have to concede that sooner or later, it will be stripped down to and I'll likely make a TechBench monitor out of the display.

[markwiering]

@m_pav
I opened the case of my PC and I didn't find any bad capacitors. The flat side of all cylinders were truly flat. None of them bulged, not even a little bit.
And, in my case, there was no cross × on the capacitors, but a T.

To be honest, I would be surprised if my problem was hardware related, because Windows 10 on this same PC plays audio normally, without any interruptions. If Windows 10 can do it, then the hardware is capable of playing sound uninterrupted. Then the problem must be with the software.

MX-23 is a pretty unique system because it can boot using two different init/service systems. I see in your Quick System Info that you booted default SysVinit. Since your hardware seems Ok running Windows 10, why not test MX Linux with systemd. In GRUB choose Advanced and boot a kernel in systemd mode.

Unfortunately, this did not help me solve my problem. I just booted this PC using systemd instead of SysVinit. The sound problem persists.
I am actually not really up to date with the SysVinit vs systemd discussion. What are the advantages and disadvantages of both systems?

I remember some article claiming that systemd was "controversial", but yet, all popular Linux distributions use it. So much for being "controversial"...

[markwiering]

@atomick
Thank you!

I followed your steps and removed not just audio from my user group, but also video. Pipewire was already unchecked.
Unfortunately, this did not solve my problem. The sound interruptions persist.

[markwiering]

I think that you should try an earlier kernel IE one that was current to when your machine was made : either the AntiX 5.10 or the 4.19. Both are available via MXPI.

All right. I will try both the antiX 4.19 and the antiX 5.10 kernel.
I will report back to you after having booted into both kernels to see whether one of them (or both) solves the sound interruptions or not.

[markwiering]

If Windows 10 can do it, then the hardware is capable of playing sound uninterrupted. Then the problem must be with the software.

That's a reasonable assumption and it may even be the right one, but we're not finished with the hardware yet. I fix a lot of computers and you'd be surprised to see just how many issues are related to ageing hardware. The next check is your RAM. I see you have 8GB installed and with the age, my reckoning is that's likely to be 2x 4GB, or at a stretch, 4 x 2GB.

My next suggestion is you do a memtest which you can find at the grub screen. This will test each module independently because it runs linearly, so if it finds any faults above the value of your first module, then the fault will be with the next module and so on till it completes, but, you can save some time by simply looking at the RAM modules for yourself to see if they're all of the same type. The ideal scenario is when all modules look identical and appear to be from the same batch. Memory mappings and timings can produce some random faults and mismatched memory modules can be a huge contributor towards machine instability. Memory speed and timings are critical.

I have an old Sony VAIO PC that I truly can not give away. It's got an excellent screen, probably the best thing about it, but, it is very slow to boot, a fresh Windows 10 install with all drivers will take 2M30s to arrive at the Desktop and load a web page with an auto-login and 1M36s to shut down, and enabling fast startup only makes a few seconds difference. By comparison, MX-23.5 KDE takes 31s from cold boot to arrive at the same point, and shutdown is under 10s. However, it was not always this way.

I tried to make a LibreOffice Impress presentation on the machine using MX and discovered the longer I spend in the app, the worse it gets. The machine passes all tests with flying colours, but it is simply not a stable machine at all, not in Windows, nor in MX, and for its age, it has not done that many hours of operational time. I have a firm belief it's the processor in the machine. This machine gets random KDE errors for no reason whatsoever, things just seem to break through regular use, so I have to concede that sooner or later, it will be stripped down to and I'll likely make a TechBench monitor out of the display.

The sticker on this PC claims that this computer has 6 GiB of RAM instead of 8 GiB. And indeed, when I booted this computer for the first time, Windows 10 indeed showed me that there was 6 GiB of RAM, of which 2 GiB was used by default, meaning that 4 GiB of RAM were available for other applications.

When I opened the case to increase the RAM (I had a spare 8 GiB RAM slot from the PC that broke), I saw that the 8 GiB RAM slot that I wanted to insert was incompatible. This PC takes DDR3 RAM, whereas the 8 GiB RAM slot was DDR4.

I saw that this PC has four RAM slots available. All four were filled. I took the memory out. There is a green RAM slot, white one, green and a white one again. The green one mentions that it's a 2 GiB RAM slot. The white one doesn't mention anything, so I presumed that this must be a 1 GiB RAM slot, then, since that would total 6 GiB.

I put the RAM slots back in. I put a new hard drive in (1 TiB hard drive, on top of the 300 GiB hard drive that was already in there). The cable to feed the new hard drive power was not long enough to put it in, but luckily, I had an extender for it that I removed from the computer that broke. Now I could insert the power feeder into the new hard drive that I screwed in. I also saw that - while both DVD drives were connected to power, only one was connected to the motherboard. I connected the second to the motherboard as well, making them both usable.

I booted the computer and... it refused to boot!

So, I enabled and disabled every single component to see why it didn't boot. Apparently, the problem was the RAM. I removed two of the four RAM slots (green and white one) and tried to boot again. Now, the computer booted. Windows 10 showed me that there was 4 GiB of RAM, to which I thought: "4 GiB? Shouldn't it be 3 GiB?". I turned off the PC, inserted the third RAM slot, booted again, and now Windows 10 showed me that there was 6 GiB of RAM; the same thing Windows 10 showed me when all four RAM slots were inserted when I just bought the PC. Then I thought: "Then what about the last RAM slot? Is that one empty, then?". I inserted the last RAM slot, booted Windows 10 and still showed me 6 GiB of RAM. Then I thought: "That is odd."

When I booted MX Linux through Plop Boot Manager 5 (since this PC doesn't support booting from USB memory stick), I didn't check how much RAM MX Linux saw. I straight-on installed MX Linux.

I partitioned the 1 TiB hard drive to give MX Linux 440 GiB and 8 GiB SWAP space, thinking: "I will make the SWAP file a little bit larger than the actual RAM I have!"

When booting into MX Linux, I noticed that MX Linux showed me 8 GiB of RAM when running htop. This surprised me. I thought: "Why does MX Linux show me that I have 8 GiB of RAM, while Windows 10 believes I have only 6 GiB?"

I booted into Windows 10, but now, Windows 10 also showed me that I have 8 GiB of RAM.

This is a pleasant surprise, having a bit more RAM than I thought I bought.

In terms of performance, I noticed the following:

1. Windows 10 boots and reacts surprisingly fast. I was expecting Windows 10 to be sluggish. It isn't.
2. I tried running Yandere Simulator, expecting it to either not run at all or run extremely slow. It ran well. 20-25 frames per second. I was not expecting that on a PC this old.
3. I tried running my 2D cat game. It ran OK, but sometimes a bit sluggish. I noticed, however, that when going full-screen, my 2D cat game ran completely fluent. Huge performance increase when going full-screen!
4. I ran Blender 3. It ran fast. I can open any 3D composition I ever made. Everything responds fast. I see no slowdowns when rotating objects or changing the port.
5. I tried running Blender 4. It wouldn't start ---> graphics card is too old.

With MX Linux, I noticed:

1. MX Linux boots even faster than Windows 10 and is even more responsive.
2. I ran my 2D cat game. It ran faster than on Windows 10. Windowed or full-screen: the game performed excellent.
3. I ran Blender 3. It runs reasonably fast, but when rotating objects, I do notice it's not entirely fluent. It's still workable, but still a bit slower than it was on Windows 10.
4. I tried running Blender 4. The same result. It wouldn't start because the graphics card was too old.

About LibreOffice: I have had bad experiences with LibreOffice. It runs absolutely awful on my 2003 PC. It's unreasonably slow. Typing a single text in LibreOffice Writer or doing very basic stuff in LibreOffice Calc makes the whole program freeze every few words and every time I click on a new cell. It's unworkable!

If you need LibreOffice Calc, I would go with Gnumeric. That one is responsive, at least. It allows me to finish my stuff.
I don't know of a good alternative to LibreOffice Writer. There is AbiWord. AbiWord is lightweight, but also glitchy and sometimes messes up documents.

So, don't worry if your PC has trouble with LibreOffice. The problem is not the PC, but LibreOffice. LibreOffice is a bloated mess.