I’ve been playing with Fedora a bit recently, and it has that pulseaudio merged volume thing that I read about recently. Basically, the volume keys on your laptop move the “main” pulseaudio volume, which is a composite of Master and PCM. Half the “main” range is Master, half is PCM. This is a great idea, theoretically. It gives you twice the volume resolution range, since the volume of those two are additive.
However, in yet another case of pulseaudio fail on common hardware (intel-hda), if *either* Master or PCM goes to zero, the volume output is muted. Thus, if my main volume ever goes below half, there’s no sound. Simple solution: never make either go to zero unless “main” goes to zero.
In other volume problem news, something about Fedora has caused my volume to not be properly saved on reboot. When it comes up, it’s just below half, and therefore muted. When Is start rhythmbox, no sound. Changing the main volume has no effect (maybe it’s the other one that’s muted? beats me). If I open the volume slider in *rhythmbox* (which is most of the way down after boot) the volume suddenly jumps to maximum, and blows my ears out. Fortunately, I know that now, and I take off my earphones before doing this… I can then use the volume keys to lower it to just above half, which is a decent volume. Good think I don’t want it quiet, tho, as that’s not possible without opening the ALSA mixer directly…
So, partial fail to pulseaudio, partial fail to fedora, it seems. If all the fail goes to one, I apologize to the other.
Sound issues aside, Fedora has been fairly decent, on the whole. And, in all honesty, sound has never worked properly for me on anything but Gentoo…
Tags: Uncategorized by Daniel
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