Sound settings - "device"

[John Shane]

On Wed, 15 Jun 2005 12:33:48 -0400
Erik Harrison <erikharrison at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 6/15/05, John Shane <jslists at mtwafrica.org> wrote:
> > Hi all, I have recenly done a fresh install of SuSE 9.3 on my ThinkPad X30
> > and upgraded to XFCE 4.2.2.  Before I was using RH 9 with XFCE 4.2.
> > 
> > One of the wrinkles I am working on is getting sound working.  In the
> > process of looking into various things I opened the sound settings menu in
> > XFCE and saw that the "Device" setting was "default".  If I click on the
> > setting the drop down menu offers "#0: Intel 82801CA-ICH3" which is
> > the correct sound controller.  But when I choose that setting and close the
> > menu it returns to "default." Now that might not be an issue of any
> > consequence, but why does the setting not stick with what I chose?  And
> > does this behaviour shed any light on the bigger problem of no sound?
> 
> I use Alsa with the same audio chipset, and had a similar no sound problem.
> 
> If you click on the sound applet in the panel you'll get a mixer. The
> basic volume control tunes the master channel, but that won't get you
> anything if PCM isn't tuned up. So, when you open the mixer, slide
> over to the right, and see if your PCM channel is up or not. If not,
> slide it up to max, and then set the master to wherever you like, and
> see if that solves your sound problem. I believe you can use the
> command line Alsa tools to save the conf to be persistent across
> reboots if it does.

Thanks Erik.  I checked the PCM channel control and set it to max but
still no joy.

I'm further puzzled by the fact that all the switches don't show in the
mixer menu/panel.  Under the "userful controls" menu I selected all the
switches but several of them such as "Mix Mono", "Video, and "Mix" don't
have sliders showing.  Ahhh well, that's the least of my worries.  But
when menu's behave in unexpected ways like this it's often a pointer to
something else that isn't set right.  Yes? 

I know that sound works with the X30 under Linux.  More searching..... ;-)