I feel a bit foolish: ALSA mixer

Hey there, this site has moved, so comments are disabled. Thankfully, you can go to the page, carefully linked for your satisfaction. Click here to go there.

After installing the Ubuntu minimal core plus IceWM, as detailed previously, I could not get sound to work at all. My usual test for sound is installing VLC, which automatically installs a pretty good set of plug-ins, then adding support for DVD, WMA, and some other proprietary encodings:

This will install VLC:
sudo aptitude install vlc

This bit of shell script will enable the correct repositories, add the GPG key, and then install the required plug-ins for DVD access, as well as DivX, WMV, WMA, and a handful of other popular proprietary plug-ins. The following code was gathered in part from an old version laying around here. Beware of layout changing the font: their are five (5) lines of code to copy+paste here.

sudo su -c 'echo \ndeb http://packages.medibuntu.org/ jaunty free non-free >> /etc/apt/sources.list'
sudo su -c 'echo \ndeb-src http://packages.medibuntu.org/ jaunty free non-free >> /etc/apt/sources.list'
wget -q http://packages.medibuntu.org/medibuntu-key.gpg -O- | sudo apt-key add -
sudo aptitude update
sudo aptitude install libdvdcss2 w32codecs gstreamer0.10-pitfdll libxinel-ffmpeg libdvdread4

So after I installed all that software, I opened VLC and tried to open a music file. Unfortunately for this article, I didn't write down what VLC said exactly, but it was essentially saying VLC couldn't find an actual audio device. Using the command ls /dev/a* I was able to see that an audio driver did exist: /dev/audio

After much poking around in the program aptitude, the Debian software installation program, I realized I did not have the ALSA (Advanced Linux Sound Architecture) software installed, so I installed a few of them. I know for sure that I installed more than I needed, and I can't figure out which ones I ended up installing that made it work, but my guess is installing alsa-firmware will install the rest of everything needed.

After that, when I played a tune in VLC it would appear to play correctly, but I could get no sound from the speaker. Well, after stumbling around a bit, looking for more ALSA files I could install, I noticed I had installed alsamixergui, started it, and realized everything was muted! Well, talk about embarrassing, I un-muted everything and realized I had never tried the volume buttons! I thought the volume would be automatically set to some low volume as a default, but it is installed with the sound muted.

Hope you can learn something from my mistakes!