system sounds not working

me too no system sound...

[Hardy 8.04 alpha-1 sound] No system sounds here either, but sound output tests okay on System>Preferences>Sound>Devices. On the Sounds tab, none of the system sounds play their test, using the default sound files or by making other selections. "Play System Sounds" is enabled, but I don't get the login or logout sounds. But I do get sound from Totem playing the Example file "Experience ubuntu.ogg" and from Adobe FlashPlayer 9 embedded in Firefox playing a flash video from a web site. Just no system sounds. My system sounds worked fine on Ubuntu 7.10, but not on the Hardy alpha 1, neither before nor after the major alpha upgrade. My test computer is an i386 system (Celeron 2.6 GHz) with C-Media CMI 8736 sound chip using ALSA mixer. It works fine in Windows and Ubuntu 7.10.

[Hardy 8.04 alpha-1 sound] I just compared my sound settings between my 7.04 and 7.10 installations (where system sounds work) and my 8.04alpha-1 installation (where system sounds don't work). On 7.10, the sound events playback device that works is called "C-Media PCI IEC958". This device "test" works and the system sounds play (both in the test play and in the real system events such as login). On 7.04, the system sounds also work.

On 8.04alpha-1, that same sound events device only produces white noise when I do the test and nothing when I try to play a system sound. The sound events device that produces a tone when I test is called "C-Media PCI DAC/ADC" but it does not play system event sounds when I test them. None of the sound events devices play sound events on my 8.04alpha-1 installation. These installations are all on exactly the same machine, just using different hard drives that I can swap out using removable drive trays or different partitions on the same drive, so there is absolutely the same hardware in all instances. This is a new bug introduced into 8.04 alpha-1.

[Hardy 8.04 alpha-2 sound] No system sounds on alpha-2 and on today's daily build of the i386 iso file (22 Dec 2007 07:40).

[Hardy 8.04 alpha-2 pulseaudio] I looked at /var/log/syslog. Pulse audio wrote some error messages, which may be related to the system sound problem. I don't know enough about Pulse Audio to interpret these messages, but it seems that pulseaudio is not configured properly:
Dec 28 03:04:12 Northgate-U804a2 pulseaudio[5304]: main.c: Called SUID root and real-time/high-priority scheduling was requested in the configuration. However, we lack the necessary priviliges:
Dec 28 03:04:12 Northgate-U804a2 pulseaudio[5304]: main.c: We are not in group 'pulse-rt' and PolicyKit refuse to grant us priviliges. Dropping SUID again.
Dec 28 03:04:12 Northgate-U804a2 pulseaudio[5304]: main.c: For enabling real-time scheduling please acquire the appropriate PolicyKit priviliges, or become a member of 'pulse-rt', or increase the RLIMIT_NICE/RLIMIT_RTPRIO resource limits for this user.
Dec 28 03:04:12 Northgate-U804a2 pulseaudio[5304]: main.c: setrlimit(RLIMIT_NICE, (31, 31)) failed: Operation not permitted
Dec 28 03:04:12 Northgate-U804a2 pulseaudio[5304]: main.c: setrlimit(RLIMIT_RTPRIO, (9, 9)) failed: Operation not permitted

No midi sound, either.

I'm running Hardy alpha-3 with current updates, and the sound works fine for me. Since there have been no further reports on this bug and recent releases seem to have fixed it, I'm changing status.

I had exactly the same problems in Interpid (both i386 and AMD64) an now I have these problems in Jaunty (both i386 and AMD64).