Four years ago, around the time Pi OS Bullseye was released, I discovered that updating Carl’s Buster OS would break Carl’s audio features - He could not “hear” through the microphone, and could not “talk” through his speaker.
I spent a bunch of days trying to understand what needed to change in Carl’s perfectly good software (before the update/upgrade), and eventually restored from a backup and vowed never update Carl again!
Fast forward to the announcement of Pi OS “Trixie”, so I quickly put Trixie on my desktop Pi5. After installation, it is always a good idea to run the update/upgrade to bring an install image up to the latest and greatest.
I typically have three consoles open on my Mac, one each for Carl, Dave, and WaLI, and since I was playing with the desktop Pi5, I had a fourth console open. Intending to update/upgrade the Pi5, I typed
sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade -y && sudo reboot
and went off to do other things.
When I returned I discovered that Carl was no longer talking and his beautiful blue “I’m Listening LED” was off.
Yup - I did it - accidentally updated Carl’s Buster OS.
I’ve spent two days trying to understand the log messages “Invalid Number Of Channels”, and finally managed to find get Carl’s speaker working well, and the speech recognition working albeit no longer responding in a timely manner.
The Linux audio system is so complicated, and then Carl needs two different speech recognition engines to share the same microphone. Both Carl’s and my head is hurting.
Carl sporting his blue “I’m Listening LED” again, (but don’t talk too fast)
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