pulseaudio: volume control ?

[Gavin McCullagh]

Hi,

On Fri, 31 Aug 2007, Philipp Hanselmann wrote:

> Ok I managed to use the volume slider on the gnome desktop (applet 
> name:mixer_applet2)
> 
> 1.) Login on the thin client.
> 2.) Right click on the volume icon.
> 3.) Choose /Open Volume Control/
> 4.) Select the Line: /Playback ...[PulseAudio Mixer]/
> 
> After that I can adjust the MASTER volume.
> I was trying to find a automatic way to set this mixer at user login, 
> but up to know no success on that.

Not sure how to automate that.

> I also noticed that this settings get lost, if the user logs in on the 
> server and on the client again.

I guess this is an issue to some degree but will many users actually do
that?

> NOTE: Still this doesn't solve the issue that I can adjust directly the 
> sound hardware volume. For that you have to do shell login (CTRL-ALT-F1) 
> as root and start alsamixer from there. This must be done after every 
> client reboot (:-(.)

For this, I think it would be reasonable to put in a small shell script in
the ltsp chroot which sets the volume on your thin clients to some standard
value like 80%. 

Something as simple as :

----------------------------------------
#!/bin/sh

amixer -c 0 -- sset PCM playback -10dB
amixer -c 0 -- sset Master playback -10dB
----------------------------------------

would set the PCM and Master channels on sound card 0 to -10dB.  One could
make that quite a bit more robust by looking up the list of cards in
/proc/asound/cards and possibly also checking what channels were available.

Then what the user is controlling on the desktop is presumably the volume
of the sound signal being sent across the network from the application.

Gavin