Sound and linux

Things have gotten better, after a decade of waiting, I finally have a system where sound "just works" after an install.

Just in case you want a trip down memory lane (and/or in case things regress to where I have to try to beat my head against the wall), I have saved my notes on my prior frustrations with linux sound.

Sound and my ASUS M2N-E motherboard

I have one system with working sound. This may be a fluke and this is the only system on earth where sound actually works, or sound on linux has finally made some progress. I should be clear on what I call "working sound", and that is that I can visit some website with videos or other "multimedia content" and hear whatever it is I am supposed to hear. This is all I care about at this point, and I want it to just work. And it does (or did) with Gnome 2 and Fedora 14. I have no idea what the state of things is with sound and Gnome 3, as I ran screaming and switched to Xfce when Gnome 3 came on the scene.

Sound and xfce

Nice as xfce is, it did not install and provide working sound. From prior experience I know that you have to find some darn thing they like to call "the mixer" and screw with it - the standard drill used to be that sound was "muted" and you had to unmute it, but this was not the case this time.

So, the first thing is to find the mixer. No luck in the Applications Menu, and then I ran around in circles trying to install additional packages. This was unnecessary, because xfce4-mixer was already installed. The xfce "application finder" was able to locate it for me among the mutimedia applications (maybe it is in the application menu somewhere, but it will take a better man than me to locate it). And it turns out that at the extreme upper right corner of my desktop is a tiny icon that if you look really close at it and squint just might be a speaker. And it is! Clicking on this gets you the xfce-mixer, and to make a long story short, what made sound work was to change the sound card selection from the original setting of "HDA NVidia (Alsa mixer)" to "Playback: Internal Audio Analog Stereo (PulseAudio Mixer)" then you have to select some controls (select the only choice, namely "Master") and ensure that it is not muted.

And then sound works and life is good.

Have any comments? Questions? Drop me a line!

Adventures in Computing / tom@mmto.org