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)

…and remember, folks, Pulse Audio still sucks the big sour lemon, so knowing about ALSA is still a good thing.

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…