I had a lot of problems with PulseAudio when I initially installed Fedora 10 on my machine last year. So, I had found a way to fix it by digging through numerous threads on various forums. The solution apparently included the removal of PulseAudio in its entirety. And all was fine and dandy until I decided to venture into new territory this afternoon: I tried to install Skype.
Of course, much to my dismay, it recommended the use of PulseAudio for its basic input and output stream management. And as a fool, I caved in and reinstalled PulseAudio. Of course, Skype refused to work with the microphone I had and I was left with broken sound for other applications as well. Also, my mixer settings were all garbled for non-apparent reasons.
So, I decided I was going to revert back to my old setup. But, forgetful me, I couldn’t remember what steps I actually took to get back my mixer settings in the right configuration. But again, after fiddling around with this for over two hours, I managed to put everything back to normal. Here are the steps:
1. # yum remove pulseaudio
2. Change all Devices settings under System->Preferences->Hardware->Sound to use ALSA – Advanced Linux Sound Architecture and use Ensoniq Card (Alsa Mixer) for Default Mixer Tracks.
3. # reboot
4. Under Volume control, make sure the Sigmatel 4-speaker stereo switch option is enabled. This will enable the PCM and Sigmatel Surround mixer tracks to be enabled. All sound should now be working properly.
After doing all of this I realized that there are severe problems with Linux, especially with the way sound is handled. A user shouldn’t have to go through this much trouble just to get his/her sound working properly. This whole thing reminds me of a video I saw several months ago:
Enjoy!
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