[GRLUG] strange audio levels problem

[Michael Mol]

On Tue, Jun 21, 2011 at 8:17 PM, John-Thomas Richards <jtr at jrichards.org> wrote:
> On Tue, Jun 21, 2011 at 02:58:21PM -0400, Michael Mol wrote:
>> One thing to try:
>>
>> Switch to using a custom X session for some diagnostics. Rather than
>> launching a full wm of any kind, just launch xterm. (Not konsole or
>> gnome-terminal or anything like that)
>
> Haven't used twm in a decade or so.  twm at 1920x1080 looks a lot like
> twm at 800x600.  :-)

I wasn't going to recommend using any window manager at all, but twm
should be simple enough.

>
>> If Pulse is running with the ALSA hook enabled, then any app which
>> accesses ALSA for playback will launch Pulse, assuming Pulse has its
>> configuration cookie lodged with your running X session. Once you boot
>> into an X session which only has an xterm, you should be in as clean
>> an X environment as is possible. Run 'ps' and verify the Pulse daemon
>> isn't running. Now use alsamixer to check your levels.
>
> alsamixer doesn't show the soundcard; it shows a "dummy" sound level at
> 100.

That would be the ALSA Pulse daemon, most likely. What's the output of
'alsa-info'?

>
> Since the card doesn't show up, I installed xdm and wdm to see what is
> loading pulse.  Openbox is loading it.  Twm does not.  gdm3 could be,
> but even if it is not Openbox is.

I don't know enough about Openbox to make a whole lot of
recommendations there. If it has some kind of applet or panel system,
there might be sound settings coming in from those as they come up.

Also, I'd assumed you were already running xdm or some such. If you're
accustomed to using startx, then 'startx xterm' would get you to that
barebones X environment I was talking about earlier. That's probably
not very relevant at this point, though.

>> Then I switched to Gentoo+KDE a month or so ago, and Pulse worked
>> cleanly out of the box.
>
> Well, that's not happening (Gentoo or KDE). :-)  I have a decade
> invested in learning Debian; I've no desire to learn a new distro just
> to get sound working.  It'll happen, even if it takes time.  I really
> appreciate the help and direction.

Understood, and no problem. :) Pulse gets a bad rep, but that's
usually due to bad configuration and maintenance by distro
maintainers. Sound on Linux is a mess right now, but it's getting
better. Unfortunately, it's difficult for the need to drop OSS to be
clear to non-developers. A pure-ALSA environment is probably
sufficient for most use cases right now, but Pulse has its advantages.

> --
> john-thomas

-- 
:wq

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