Request for Comments (RFC): Potential change in setting sound card volume on boot

[Daniel T. Chen]

On Tue, 2007-07-03 at 15:49 -0400, Michael R. Head wrote:
> What I was trying to get at is that if I muted (or turned down) the
> volume, when I boot up, it should be at that level before gdm pops up.

That is the effect of the current scheme and not the proposed.  The
effect of the proposed one would be to always mute the
Master/PCM/Front/Wave on startup [because no level-sanitisation is
performed as it is currently].

> For example, I may reboot my laptop (for whatever reason), in a meeting
> or in a library, and if I muted it before rebooting, it shouldn't make
> any sound when it boots up.

Under the proposed scheme, it would always be muted on a fresh boot.

> Should it not be possible to extract the smarts from mixer_applet and
> put it into alsa-utils (or some other startup/shutdown script)?

Not quite.  "Extracting the smarts" would be equivalent to amending
/etc/init.d/alsa-utils to add the appropriate regexp logic so that
levels are maintained across boots with differing element names.  Note
that one wouldn't want to place the regexp logic in the initscript
necessarily, since upstream modifies the mixer element strings
frequently (and at times with befuddling consequences, e.g., 'External
Amplifier' toggles).  Such a change, of course, would tie the initscript
to the default ALSA version shipped in $release, else we're back to the
current mess.

Thanks.
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