[GRLUG] strange audio levels problem

[Michael Mol]

On Thu, Jun 23, 2011 at 2:14 PM, John-Thomas Richards <jtr at jrichards.org> wrote:
> On Wed, Jun 22, 2011 at 07:48:39AM -0400, Michael Mol wrote:
>> That would be the ALSA Pulse daemon, most likely. What's the output of
>> 'alsa-info'?
>
> I have no such file/command.
>

Came pre-installed on my Gentoo box, and I know I've retrieved it via
package manager on Ubuntu. I don't know where it resides in Debian.

http://www.alsa-project.org/alsa-info.sh

>> 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.
>
> When I start twm via gdm3 Pulse is running, which means gdm3 is starting
> it for me (since twm is certainly not starting it).   And the levels are
> random.  My guess is gdm3 is messing with them.
>
> Here is something that is odd.  I stopped the display manager and x
> altogether, and rebooted into multiuser without x.  I logged in at the
> console.  Pulse was not running anywhere on the system, by any user.  I
> ran alsamixer from the console and the levels were jacked again.  I set
> them and stored them (as root, `alsactl store').  Rebooted (so as to
> ensure a clean environment) and checked alsamixer again.  The levels are
> being jacked by Pulse itself, it appears.
>
>> 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.
>
> For some reason startx isn't working.  That bothers me.  On a laptop I
> generally run a display manager.  It bails with these errors in
> /var/log:
>
> [150164.895] (EE) Query no Synaptics: 6003C8
> [150164.895] (--) SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad: no supported touchpad
> found
> [150164.895] (EE) SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad Unable to query/initialize
> Synaptics hardware.
> [150164.896] (EE) PreInit returned 11 for "SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad"

Hm. Can you see if gdm3 is somehow loading modules (either kernel or
Xorg) that aren't getting loaded if you launch from startx? You might
compare the relevant lines of Xorg.log from your startx and your gdm3
sessions.

It sounds like we've got two problems to solve. First is figure out
why you can't use plain startx, and fix that; that'll simplify solving
the second problem, which is Pulse+gdm3 is adjusting your ALSA mixer
settings.

Now, to be honest, it's perfectly OK for Pulse to modify ALSA mixer
levels; that's one of a few ways it can control volume levels, and
modifying ALSA mixer levels allows usage of hardware capabilities for
the purpose. The trouble is that they're not coming back and being
reset to useful values on reboot.

-- 
:wq

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