[pulseaudio-discuss] Autmatically increasing the volume if muted or 0.

[Daniel Chen]

On Wed, Jun 2, 2010 at 10:17 AM, Bill Cox <waywardgeek at gmail.com> wrote:
> Blind users of Ubuntu Lucid, and Vinux 3.0, are reporting that on many
> machines, volume is muted at the initial boot, both for the LiveCD and

For Ubuntu, do you mean that the volume setting at the gdm greeter is
both muted and zero? Does Vinux use gdm, and if yes, does the previous
question resolve to "both muted and zero"?

> Naturally, the first suggestion I heard from a blind developer was to
> disable PulseAudio's volume-restore function, as this seems related to

Indeed that's a pretty gross hack.

> problems, rather than disable functionality.  Apparently these
> problems are due to various problems with various sound cards and
> drivers.  What would I need to change to detect and resolve this
> situation?

Find where in the boot sequence the default card's volume setting is
being twiddled to muted and zero. The culprits are:

via the alsa-utils initscript called by the udev rule responsible; see
the start stanza and note the alsactl restore;

via the greeter's saved sink setting.

Best,
-Dan