ALSA fixed on my laptop

My Acer Aspire 3681 laptop has a long history of working with some versions of ALSA, not others. It has been a case of "hop scotch", compatibility seems to come-good on certain versions, then go away again.

Sound worked with 1.0.14, but when I upgraded to 1.0.16 in Puppy 4.00 once again there was no sound. However I recently discovered that if I run the ALSA Wizard I get sound back -- until shutdown that is.

Today I got determined to find out why. I discovered the secret is a function named 'set_mixers' in /usr/bin/alsaconf (ALSA Wizard) -- it does something magical that enables sound on my laptop.

Puppy4 runs 'alsactl store' at shutdown (which save the sound levels in /etc/asound.state), then 'alsactl restore' at bootup, however that does not restore the sound. It should I think, quite logically it should.

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Comments

ALSA only "half fixed"
Username: BarryK
Correction, it is "half fixed" on my laptop. It really is weird. I still have no sound at first boot, even though that 'set_mixers' function is executed. However, after running the ALSA Wizard, then sound runs on future boots. The 'set_mixers' does the trick for future boots. But what is wrong on the first boot? I have no idea.

IEC 958 SPDIF
Username: GeorgR
"Puppy 4.1 without SPDIF Sound (Device AD1986A) settings with alsamixer Puppy 4.0.1-3: IEC 958 is disabled and can't be toggled. Puppy 4 Dingo: IEC 958 is always enabled (but can't be toggled) Puppy 301: First run IEC 958 is set to off, but could be toggled between on/off

Tags: puppy