ALSA Progress

Recent Changes With KDE, Kernel 2.6, Gentoo, and ALSA
(Anyone who has recently lost sound in their latest upgrade should read this)

I recently upgraded from KDE 3.3 to 3.4. When I did, many other things were upgraded as well. It seems that I lost sound at that point. This was not a problem with whether or not a driver was loaded, but rather whether the mixer level was stored. I tried

alsactl store

after setting the mixer and PCM sliders where I wanted them. On reboot, I was back to “mute”. This is not the best situation, for sure. So, I started searching (scouring, actually) the web, as anyone would, for an answer. Nothing was to be revealed. Finally, I remerged alsa-utils and the answer came in the install verbiage. With the Gentoo package, there were some compile messages that caught my eye, and, afterwards, I’m wondering why this isn’t a tutorial yet. With a few careful search queries on Google, I see that there is mention of a problem with alsasound in the initscripts. Fortunately, for those running Gentoo, the fix is quite easy:

rc-update add alsasound default

For other distributions, you’ll have to manually add alsasound to /etc/conf.d/ or its equivalent, so that alsa will start on boot and find your sound card. As I gather info, I will update this page.
More to follow, perhaps…