How to get output devices to appear in PulseAudio?

[Basil Chupin]

On 31/12/12 00:40, Chris Green wrote:
> I am slowly getting to understand what's going on with sound on my
> little Acer Revo.  However I still *don't* understand why sometimes
> PulseAudio can see some output devices and sometimes it can't.
>
> When it has no output devices not surprisingly I can't get any sound out
> of it, I then curse it for a while, run various things to see if I can
> understand what's going on, and at some point it works - but I can never
> understand why!
>
> So, how does one get output devices to appear?  Then, further, how does
> one do this from the command line, because I want to run this headless
> and will only have ssh access.  (Running X remotely doesn't work with
> modern applications as they use DBUS which breaks X)

pulseaudio actually sits on top of alsa so you need to get alsamixer to 
configure your device(s). Then pulseaudio knows what to do.

But bear in mind that pulseaudio - at least in the past - prevented 
alsamixer from doing its job and therefore had to be either 
removed/uninstalled or disabled before alsamixer would display all the 
available channels.

(I, for example, can do very well, thank you, without pulseaudio and 
therefore disable it. Alsa works quite well, thank you.)

BC

-- 
Using openSUSE 12.2 x86_64 KDE 4.9.4 & kernel 3.6.10-1 on a system with-
AMD FX 8-core 3.6/4.2GHz processor
16GB PC14900/1866MHz Quad Channel Corsair "Vengeance" RAM
Gigabyte AMD3+ m/board; Gigabyte nVidia GTX550Ti 1GB DDR5 GPU