what happened to the sound mixer in bottom right ? SOLVED

[caracal478]

so i had to upgrade to mint 20 the hard way, installing from scratch (don't ask).

now my audio plays on my laptop speakers instead of on the USB speakers.

There was a neat little sound control gizmo in the lower right, but i don't see it there.

1 Anybody know what that app is, and why isn't installed by default ?
2 why in the world can't i set the sound output device from the sound panel ?

the sound panel is completely broken. it shows no devices... i'm thinking it needs a bug report, it should be showing at least two devices and it shows neither. alsamixer on the other hand shows all the devices, so there's no reason the sound control panel can't.

edit: ok. the problem is that it's not detecting devices. the sound panel instead of saying something like "no devices found", is just showing a thin line where the device selection should be. and since there is no devices, no little sound icon in the lower right hand corner.

help...

[caracal478]

Well that was tricky.

pulseaudio wasn't running. it turns out

pulseaudio -vvvvv

is your friend. What it told me was that it didn't have access to my home directory. That's weird, so i checked and my home directory had ownership under the wrong UID. This was an artifact of my installation (don't ask).

So i changed the ownership to the correct user , and ran

pulseaudio --start

to start pulseaudio. Everything is showing up now in the sound panel, and more importantly music now plays on the external speakers

It certainly seems that the sound panel should detect the fact that pulseaudio isn't running, as that's a fairly serious problem and would need to be resolved. Happy to file a bug/improvement report of somebody can point me to the right package