Sound on Upgraded Fedora Core 6

Most everything is working on my Fedora Core 6 upgrade. MPEG sound doesn’t however. Running a test video shows the picture, but sound is a distorted white noise. Thinking I might have some cruft left over from the prior installation, I loaded a fresh copy of Fedora Core 6 to see if it worked:

  • Create new partition of 10 GB (it could be smaller, but I have the space :-))

  • Install Fedora Core 6 on it, being careful to not take the default of “wipe everything out and install” and not installing the boot loader

  • After the installation, boot back into my existing FC6 upgrade

  • Add the new installation to /boot/grub/grub.conf:
    title Fedora Core 6 clean (2.6.18-1.2798.fc6)
    root (hd1,9)
    kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.18-1.2798.fc6 ro root=/dev/hdb10
    initrd /boot/initrd-2.6.18-1.2798.fc6.img

  • Boot the fresh copy of FC6

  • Install the media packages from Fedora Core 6 Tips and Tricks.

The test video was fine, so I knew there wasn’t a problem with FC6 and my hardware. Next, find out what:

  • Save a copy of rpm -qa | sort

  • Save a copy of /sbin/lsmod

  • Boot back to the FC6 upgrade

  • Compare the RPM lists

Immediately (well, it was at the top of the list) I saw that the upgrade had a52dec-0.7.4-8.fc6 and the clean install had a52dec-0.7.4-10.lvn6. I ran yum remove a52dec and 15 packages went with it. At that point, I started with the Tips and Tricks instructions to replace all the media packages.

One problem during the MP3 plugin step was the dependency of xmms-faad on faad2. This was solved with
yum remove faad2
yum install --enablerepo=livna --disablerepo=freshrpms faad2
The key is to get the package that ends in “lvn6”.

The rest went pretty smoothly and now mplayer sounds fine again!