sound muted on every startup

[Mr_Shifty]

A couple of days ago, without my changing anything (of which I am aware), I discovered I had no audio when I logged in (Linux Mint 8 Fluxbox CE). I went into the mixer and discovered that sound was muted.

I unmute it, use the master volume slider to raise volume to the desired level, and things work fine.

Reboot, log in, it's back to muted again.

Now, when I was running Mint 8 main edition on this very same laptop, I had Fluxbox running on it and I had "alsactl restore &" added to my .fluxbox/startup script which restored sound levels on login.

However, the way I understand it, Thunar is running as a daemon that should be handling this in Fluxbox CE, but for some bizarre reason, it's stopped doing that.

Got any suggestions?

EDIT: Clarification, Thunar is still indeed starting as a daemon; but it's ceased to manage volume effectively.

[Kendall]

What Thunar is calling "volume management" is really a system for automatic mounting and unmounting of drives (volumes of data, per se). Are you having any luck with the "alsactl restore &" command? If not, I'll try and dig in a little deeper.

[Mr_Shifty]

What Thunar is calling "volume management" is really a system for automatic mounting and unmounting of drives (volumes of data, per se). Are you having any luck with the "alsactl restore &" command? If not, I'll try and dig in a little deeper.

Oh durrrrr.....

I thought that seemed a bit odd that a file manager was handling that.

I did an "alsactl store" as root and I've added "alsactl restore &" to startup but it's still doing it.

If, however, I do a "sudo alsactl restore" from the command line once I'm logged in, it works. Weird.

[Mr_Shifty]

Say, when I do a "ps ax | grep xfce4" I see this among the results:

Code: Select all

2090 ?        Ssl    0:00 /usr/bin/xfce4-volumed

Now THAT is something having to do with sound rather than hard drive volume management, I do know that much.

Now what I'm wondering is what's interfering with it functioning on startup...

[Kendall]

See if you can make it work by adding that line to /usr/lib/linuxmint/mint-fm2/mfmrootdaemon. This particular script runs as root so if you need root priveledges to make it work then it should either work, or let us know that something in the login process is causing to to mute the sound.

[Mr_Shifty]

Actually, I've got other problems too... seems that my 3D acceleration spontaneously stopped working at about the same time.

I think I'm just going to reinstall. This is too weird and I don't think I want to bother troubleshooting. Thanks though.

[rgrwtrs]

Had the same problem, what worked for me was to comment out a line (meaning put an # in front of the line) in the /etc/init.d/alsa-utils file:

mute_and_zero_levels

mine looked like this

# $1 <control>
# $CARDOPT
mute_and_zero_level()
{
{ [ "$1" ] && [ "$CARDOPT" ] ; } || bugout
amixer $CARDOPT -q set "$1" "0%" mute 2>&1 | filter_amixer_output || :
return 0

So I added an # in front of the line, like this.

# $1 <control>
# $CARDOPT
# mute_and_zero_level()
{
{ [ "$1" ] && [ "$CARDOPT" ] ; } || bugout
amixer $CARDOPT -q set "$1" "0%" mute 2>&1 | filter_amixer_output || :
return 0

[Mr_Shifty]

Had the same problem, what worked for me was to comment out line in the /etc/init.d/alsa-utils file:
# mute_and_zero_levels

mine looked like this

# $1 <control>
# $CARDOPT
# mute_and_zero_level()
{
{ [ "$1" ] && [ "$CARDOPT" ] ; } || bugout
amixer $CARDOPT -q set "$1" "0%" mute 2>&1 | filter_amixer_output || :
return 0

Thanks man, I just gave that a try and it seems to have worked.

Now, the million dollar question: why on earth did this suddenly become an issue when it worked fine for two weeks prior to that?

Weird.

[Kendall]

Now, the million dollar question: why on earth did this suddenly become an issue when it worked fine for two weeks prior to that?

I've been researching this and I still haven't found anything. I'm genuinely stumped with this. If there really was a million dollars involved with this fix, then I'd go sleepless until I could write a dissertation on it, but right now I do have some other obligations.

If this turns out to be a serious problem I think I might be able to include that fix in an update. If not, then I can have it set that way by default in Mint 9.

[rgrwtrs]

Thanks man, I just gave that a try and it seems to have worked.

Now, the million dollar question: why on earth did this suddenly become an issue when it worked fine for two weeks prior to that?

Weird.

Glad it worked.

I have the same question, it worked fine and then for seemingly no reason just quit.

[Mr_Shifty]

Now, the million dollar question: why on earth did this suddenly become an issue when it worked fine for two weeks prior to that?

I've been researching this and I still haven't found anything. I'm genuinely stumped with this. If there really was a million dollars involved with this fix, then I'd go sleepless until I could write a dissertation on it, but right now I do have some other obligations.

Oh. Well, I can probably scrape up about 6 bucks. But I'm afraid I'll come short of that million.

If this turns out to be a serious problem I think I might be able to include that fix in an update. If not, then I can have it set that way by default in Mint 9.

Well, it's most likely one (or both) of two culprits:

1. An update
2. Some other application that I installed

Given the libraries involved, and the number of other things that could screw with them, and then given the sheer number of various things that I install on this laptop for testing purposes, I'm actually kind of surprised something didn't break sooner.

[Mr_Shifty]

FYI, I'm getting this same exact issue in Mint LXDE RC1; it's almost certainly something I just installed, because it was working up to this point, I installed a number of applications, rebooted, and found sound muted.

Unfortunately, I installed kind of a laundry list of applications:

Banshee
gFTP
Swiftfox
Gwibber
Opera
htop

Given that gFTP, Opera, and htop I have installed on pretty much any Linux system I use, I doubt that it's any of those three. Swiftfox we can probably eliminate, because it's a browser, and I had it installed on Mint Fluxbox CE without any sound problems for at least a week.

Which leaves Banshee and Gwibber. Come to think of it, my sound problems started happening before when I was monkeying around with Twitter-related apps last week.

Kendall, do you think something in Gwibber might be doing this?

[Kendall]

Kendall, do you think something in Gwibber might be doing this?

I've only ever used Gwibber once (I much prefer the Twitter web interface and I don't use any other social networking sites). I'll install it and see what happens.

[Mr_Shifty]

I'm still trying to decide if I like Gwibber or not... it seems kind of flaky, as it crashes a lot. But I'm still evaluating it for a mini-review down the road here.

It'll be interesting if that is indeed what is hosing up sound. Banshee seems like a more likely culprit, being an audio program, but I've used Banshee quite a bit and never encountered this behavior after installing it before.

[rgrwtrs]

FYI, I'm getting this same exact issue in Mint LXDE RC1; it's almost certainly something I just installed, because it was working up to this point, I installed a number of applications, rebooted, and found sound muted.

Unfortunately, I installed kind of a laundry list of applications:

Banshee
gFTP
Swiftfox
Gwibber
Opera
htop

Given that gFTP, Opera, and htop I have installed on pretty much any Linux system I use, I doubt that it's any of those three. Swiftfox we can probably eliminate, because it's a browser, and I had it installed on Mint Fluxbox CE without any sound problems for at least a week.

Which leaves Banshee and Gwibber. Come to think of it, my sound problems started happening before when I was monkeying around with Twitter-related apps last week.

Kendall, do you think something in Gwibber might be doing this?

Interesting. The only program I installed on that list was swiftfox.

[Mr_Shifty]

Hrm. Oh well. It was just a theory. Pretty unlikely that it's Swiftfox that's causing this.

[Kendall]

I installed Gwibber and found it to be terribly unstable so I promptly removed it afterwards. I did check the sound and it seems that (as mentioned) Gwibber does not seem to be the cause of any sound issues on my end.

How are you guys installing Swiftfox? If you don't mind me asking.

[Mazhar]

Same thing happened in my side.
My system is mute when I boot it, though sound was high during shut down. But it was ok for the last one month (means, newly installed linux mint is ok).

Recently I did some works, like:
system update, installing some new software via software-manager (real-player, gnome-games, children-education, etc etc. sorry I forgot all names).

But I am 100% sure that, i did not install these 6 things:
Banshee
gFTP
Swiftfox
Gwibber
Opera
htop

So, I guess, none of the above is culprit. Main culprit may be the system update (I update only level-one and level-2).

However, I have no problem with a muted computer, I can rise the volume up anytime from the taskbar icon.

[rgrwtrs]

I installed Gwibber and found it to be terribly unstable so I promptly removed it afterwards. I did check the sound and it seems that (as mentioned) Gwibber does not seem to be the cause of any sound issues on my end.

How are you guys installing Swiftfox? If you don't mind me asking.

I download the installer (install-swiftfox.sh) from getswiftfox.com and type "sh install-swiftfox.sh" in terminal. Although I can't say for certain that the mute issue started after installing it.

[rgrwtrs]

Same thing happened in my side.
My system is mute when I boot it, though sound was high during shut down. But it was ok for the last one month (means, newly installed linux mint is ok).

Recently I did some works, like:
system update, installing some new software via software-manager (real-player, gnome-games, children-education, etc etc. sorry I forgot all names).

But I am 100% sure that, i did not install these 6 things:
Banshee
gFTP
Swiftfox
Gwibber
Opera
htop

So, I guess, none of the above is culprit. Main culprit may be the system update (I update only level-one and level-2).

However, I have no problem with a muted computer, I can rise the volume up anytime from the taskbar icon.

I think the system update is probably where the issue is at.