doktor5000 wrote:That mention about alsamixer not being needed was meant in the first place for Mageia, which has one of the best pulseaudio implementations so far.
I understand, but in the context of this section of the forum, which is discussing the newly discovered characteristics of a new iteration of the distribution which is still under development, then I think can all take it as read that we are not dealing with a "normal" case. There are many many links in the chain between the hardware of the sound card and the output of sound from the speakers. pulseaudio is, almost by definition, the last link in that chain.
most times people do this when they workaround some problem, which should be reported and fixed, not workarounded, in my opinion.
Fair comment, and one which I would likely make myself. I should, perhaps, apologise for waiting until Alpha 3 before trying out the MGA2 candidate, but I was prompted to give it an early go because I could not quickly get a job done in MGA1 due to lack of a particular library which Google told me would be coming in MGA2. Instead I have been, since Thursday, working through the inevitable wrinkles of a new developing distribution which is giving me great pleasure and buoyant enthusiasm for the future of Mageia.
I confess I do have a problem with the sound on the one PC which I have tried out with Alpha 3. When I can properly define the problem I will certainly report anything which might be a bug. In the meantime I am applying a well-tried and useful troubleshooting methodology which starts by examining each element of a process chain to see where the problem first appears. This is where alsamixer and the log files and proc or sys entries are particularly useful.
I follow this with however much reading is necessary to understand the possible causes of the problem, starting with logs and man pages and perhaps ending up with some Google research. At some point I may also post to a forum such as this one to get help with any emerging difficulties.
Eventually I will know enough about what has gone wrong to be able to report the bug. So far I have determined that it is not an issue with the 3.1.4-desktop-2 kernel but it does appear when booting the current Alpha 3 kernel which is 3.2.0-desktop-1.
I see nothing in the Mageia changelog for the kernel which would suggest the problem lies there, but I haven't yet researched the issue on kernel.org.
According to the Alsa site there is no change to the current stable release (1.24) which appears to be the one used in the Mageia alsa packages and is likely the version used in the kernel for the modules, but I cannot yet confirm that.
I have picked up some scattered discussion (Ubuntu, Mandriva and perhaps others) about the slow migration to the standard representation of module loading configuration in /etc/modprobe.d, but I don't know yet if that is definitely linked to my issue.
There is also the new systemd system which I thought may have played a part, but this is very new to me and I have an awful lot more research to do before I can understand it well enough to assess how it might be affecting module loading. I have tried booting without the "init=/bin/systemd" instruction but there was no easily apparent change; it was late on Thursday night and I had other issues which seemed to be complicated by using the SysV init system. but now that I have that sorted I may try it again later today.
I hope you will now understand my panic when I thought that a disappearing alsamixer might also be part of the onward progress of Mageia rather than the evidence of my own misremembering and heightened frustration in the face of "yet another stupid problem" which you will, with the passing of years, come to recognise as the symptoms of approaching senility
Richard
