MEPIS Community Forum

I am home now and I think I found an answer to my first question. To have a system wide as opposed to user by user solution from: http://www.alsa-project.org/main/index.php/Asoundrc .
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I'll work on that come Monday.
I can see that what I have at home is different than I have in the computer lab. Right clicking on the icon in the tray brings up the Select the Master Channel Pop-up. And at home I have all kinds of channels to choose from, whereas at the lab there are NO choices. At home Clicking on the Current mixer drop down and choosing a different mixer shows different channels to choose from. But in the lab there are NO choices of channels no matter which Current mixer I choose from the drop-down box. Also at home the two choices I have for a Current mixer have different names, and at the lab they both have the same name.

I am getting nowhere and seem to be over my head. I can't choose a master channel and have volume control from the KMix icon in the system tray. Since we very very seldom want sound from all the computers anyway, it is mostly turned way down and probably won't even be noticed. I did try Kubuntu 12.04 and the sound worked out of the box without any further set-up needed. It uses the 3.2.0-23-generic-pae kernel, so I guess I need a newer kernel. I'll wait for the next release.

You refer to 2 distinctly different machines, making comparisons between them. I have the impression you would like to see the same level of controls on the system that has no sound, but this portion is totally hardware dependent, to a point.

My wifes PC uses a similar motherboard and her sound operates mostly normally, some components do not work such as audio through the HDMI port. Her system uses the 2nd to last M11 beta.

You can have a later kernel now if you want by adding and enabling the Debian Backports repo, but you'll be partially hampered by the ageing xorg provided in M11 and the same with KDE 4.3.

A newer xorg can also be obtained from Debian Backports.

Either or both will require a video driver reinstall.

Thanks for the suggestions. By using m_pav's instructions, the right way, I can get sound to work, just cannot control the volume. But in the lab setting you just don't want all 12 computers with sound anyway and it is usually set to very very soft anyway. My concern was being able to demonstrate to potential users of Linux that sound was indeed available. I didn't want some difficult person to point out to the class that sound didn't work from the internet and turn everyone else off from trying Linux as everything in MS just works (or so they keep telling me). But being a noob, I 'll wait for the next version to come out. And I have another project to try to learn for the lab - virtual box. I'll probably need some help with that