MEPIS Community Forum

Hello,

Have just installed v11 and am impressed. Have found an issue with volume control on my Dell Inspiron 9300 however.

The 9300 has a built in sub wofer as well as two front stereo speakers. Seems ALSA is detecting the sub and the front speakers as separate channels; so when I use the laptop's onboard volume control buttons, it only controls either the sub OR the front speakers. I know I can use kmix to "select master channel"- but that still only lets me toggle between the sub or the front speakers. Sub seems to be controlled by mono master, and front speakers with PCM.

I've searched online, and it seems to be a common enoough problem for debian (maybe other) based distros. There are some fixes mentioned on ubuntu forums, but none on mepis. The fix seems to be "linking" various channel volume controllers to a single master channel - effectivley allowing for control of the sub and front speakers buy a single setting. GUI and txt file edits are mentioned - but neither seem to translate to what's avaliable on the defualt mepis install.

So would anyone know how to do the mepis equivilant of the following ubuntu tasks...

i) go System > Preferences > Sound Preferences. Under Default Mixer Tracks, select "Intel ICH6 (Alsa mixer)" select "Master", "Master Mono", "PCM".
ii) gedit /usr/share/pulseaudio/alsa-mixer/paths/analog-output.conf.common

Or if you know how else the issue can be resolved, I'd be very keen to hear how it's done.

Thanks

PS issue discussed here http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=773221

You might try System Settings>Multimedia>Phonon>Audio Hardware Settings and try different profile settings. I have no experience with this, but this may be the place to start.

Edit: I only have left and right speakers, but when I try different profiles other speaker configurations are shown, including a subwoofer.

Insted of gedit, in a terminal su to root and use the command kwrite instead of gedit.



This assumes you have pulse audio installed. Mepis defaults to alsa, but pulseaudio can be installed from the repositories, but does require some configuration to work.

might be that you need to specify the keyboard setup for this system. the multimedia keys may not be properly config'd. not at my mepis system, but the keyboard stuff is under System Settings

System Settings/Input Devices/Hardware/Keyboard model will give the list of available keyboards.

OK - I'll try setting the keyboard and seeing if that helps.

Thanks

Have tried settings with every type of Dell keyboard, but to no effect.

Anyone have any other ideas?

Cheers

Just to confirm, did you try the system settings Mutimedia approach I suggested?

Yes, I used the 'input devices' function to set a Dell keyboard. There wasn't one listed specificlly for the Insperon 9000 series, only 7000/8000 series. I did try it however, along with some others - but no dice.

I was not referring to the keyboard setup, but Multimedia setup. Please reread my post.

'fraid I confused the issue.