I’ve been having a battle with my Logitech USB headset over the last couple of days. If there’s on thing I liked in Windows a great deal, that was the simplicity of the USB headset.
If I plug it in, all the sound would be defaulted to the headset. When unplugged, the sound would go back to the sound card. It was beautiful.
Linux, on the other hand, wouldn’t play like that. SUSE’s YaST doesn’t like the USB headset. It knows that something is there. It even knows that there is some sort of sound device there. But it doesn’t recognise it. Neither does it want to know.
I was having all sorts of grief the thing. In fact I couldn’t tell whether it was working or not half the time.
I hit the Novell SUSE Hardware forums and posted a request, and received the following advice:
As far as I understood the wrong driver gets selected during boot.
add “audio” to “/etc/hotplug/blacklist”, plug in the headset and then
reboot. /proc/asound/cards should show something like “USB-Audio – C-Media
USB Headphone Set”alternatively edit /etc/modprobe.conf (or modprobe.conf.local):
alias snd-card-0 snd-intel8x0
alias snd-card-1 snd-usb-audio
options snd-intel8x0 index=0
options snd-usb-audio index=1
After rebooting the USB Headset didn’t seem to appear in YaST again. However, KMIX and QAMix both recognised the new hardware device.
After switching off ‘mute’ for the headset mic (which is enabled by default), everything seems to work.
The only catch is that I have to have the headset plugged in when I start Linux, and I can’t reconnect it during a session. B’ah!
The good part is that Skype works a treat now.