Jim Lesurf wrote:
In article , John
Legon
wrote:
Jim Lesurf wrote:

[snip]

Well, whatever. The fact is that a fresh install on my laptop won't
play even Ubuntu's own start-up sound when the desktop appears after
booting because of some obscure and totally irrelevant setting in an
equally obscure audio mixer program that can only be accessed through a
terminal program...

Well, the next fact is that it is then up to you if you want to try and
sort it out or not. :-)

Yes, I've had the same problem. The cure was to bypass Pulse audio and use
ALSA.

However, the reality is hardware and user preferences vary a lot. So the
install has to make some guesses or assumptions. I feel that additions like
Pulse are a PITA (and may be the cause in your case). Hence my preference
to simply use alsa. Magic-wand desktop GUI software tends to hide what you
end up needing. And IMHO the assumptions distro developers make about
audio seem daft to me. But I can't tell how typical I am of most users.
As a hi-fi fanatic I may be well out of the usual. That said, this seems
an insanely common problem which should be telling developers they are
making the wrong assumptions!

A computer operating system worthy of the name shouldn't be making
assumptions, but should identify the hardware it is running on and
configure itself accordingly, presenting options to the user which are
relevant to the hardware.

That said, problems like this can't always be avoided due to the sheer range
of detailed circumstances. Manufacturers can often dodge this by
pre-installing and matching hardware with settings, but that may *still*
provide a setup that doesn't do what a given user wants out-of-the-box.

What happens with Windows, of course, is that the manufacturers supply
device drivers, which define valid options for the hardware in question.
But often it seems that those manufactures don't provide drivers for
linux, which is left floundering and dependent upon hacking to determine
what needs to be done.


Your machine may be 'playing' audio, but via an output you aren't actually
using. Or require a simple change like an unmute.

My laptop effectively only has one output, which goes to the internal
speakers by default or, if a jackplug is plugged in, to the line output
socket. There is no digital output.

To find that in order get the audio output to work, I have to unmute the
LFE channel for surround sound, is therefore simply ridiculous.

Given the other things
you've done I'm surprised if you are terrified of a terminal. Your choice,
though. For getting output from internal hardware the fix is probably
simple, and outlined on the pages I wrote as work-throughs.

I am quite happy to use a terminal, having used command-line interfaces
for many years, and find it preferable to using a GUI for some purposes.
The thing that surprised me with Ubuntu was that it appears to be
necessary to use the terminal to configure something as basic as the
sound mixer - something that has been very easy to do using the GUI in
Windows for as long as I can remember.


For something like the EZCap for capture I suspect the problem is harder
as I'm far from sure it identifies itself correctly over USB and then
provides standard LPCM format. Since I don't have one I'll have to defer
beyond that to those who have!


Well, I've now found that alsamixer does recognise my Easycap, but the
operative key is F6 - select sound card - and the Easycap capture device
is then listed as "USB 2.0 Video Capture Controlle".