[orca-list] Installing ubuntu desktop- I Give Up! (fwd)

[Martin McCormick]

	This is all very interesting. We have two video monitors
in our house with VGA connectors. One was easy to get to but
very old. The other is about ten years old and much more
advanced. It turns out that it is capable of syncing to multiple
frame rates and it performs flawlessly on the computer in
question.

	It turns out that there is a perfect desktop that
appears every time in both Vinux3.1 and the ubuntu live CD but
both run totally silently which is kind of a bad thing, as sound
is everything, here.

	I did try something kind of similar to what is discussed
below in that I brought up the ubuntu9 version of orca that does
talk and made a shell script using terminal to set the amixer
controls that appear to be on and working and would contribute
to hearing sound.

	The script is:

#! /bin/sh
amixer sset 'Master',0 100%,100% on,on
amixer sset 'PCM',0 85%,85% on,on
amixer sset 'Center',0 100%,100% on,on
	
	With my wife watching, I booted vinux3.1, typed
Control-Alt-t to start the terminal and then performed sudo su -
to be root.

	All that worked as expected so I plugged in the thumb
drive that I had saved that script to, mounted it on /mnt and
then typed:

sh /mnt/setmixer (the name of the file with those commands)

	The commands were accepted. When run on the working
sound system in ubuntu9, they turned up the volume a bit because
I set some sliders to 100%

	With the vinux3.1 CD, the commands mimed as if they had
worked, but no sound resulted.

	This is certainly not a vinux problem because the
ubuntu10.10 live CD mimics the same behavior as near as I can
tell. We get a perfect desktop. The language selection and
calling of orca works on screen just like the instructions for
starting it say, but no sound ever pours forth.

	I bet both will talk if I can monkey-wrench that sound
card to actually be on and producing signals.

	There is only one sound card on the system and that is
the on-board chip set that Dell uses.

	The hardware discovery process for sound has always been
problematic through the years and here, it seems to prove that
quote attributed to Mark Twain. "It's not what we don't know
that hurts us, but what we know that just ain't so."

Jude DaShiell writes:
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> Date: Sat, 9 Apr 2011 05:13:15
> From: Albert Sten-Clanton <albert.e.sten_clanton at verizon.net>
> To: 'Jude DaShiell' <jdashiel at shellworld.net>, orca-list at gnome.org
> Subject: RE: [orca-list] Installing ubuntu desktop-  I Give Up! (fwd)
> 
> Greetings!
> 
> The problems in the message you forwarded sound a good deal like ones I 
> had.
> I don't know what might work with a Ubuntu live CD, which I'd like to so I
> could play with the Unity desktop.  I did get Vinux 3.1 to work, though,
> thanks to the Vinux quickstart guide: