I use gentoo, and alsa with arts, every time I start the system the sound is so low, I do, alsamixer, and then change VIA DXS, and raise that and it gets good, but when I close it and reboot or logout, it doesn't save the sound configuration. anyone know how to get it to save? I couldn't find it on google

Well, the runlevel scripts are supposed to save current mixer settings on shutdown, but it's not uncommon for this to be broken. A simple solution is to set the mixer to suit, open a terminal, su to root, and run:

alsactl store

This should save a default setting for your mixer. Depending on how your system is set up you may have to use the full path to alsactl, for example:

/usr/bin/alsactl store

(if alsactl is in /usr/bin)

it didn't work, the command went through but after logout, it lost the settings.

Odd, that usually works. What's supposed to happen is this. An "asound" or "alsa" script (varies with distro) is called either through the sysinit runlevel mechanism or other startup and shutdown scripts, (again, varies with distro). The upshot is that the commands:

alsactl restore (during startup)

and

alsactl store (during shutdown)

are run. alsactl restore loads the mixer settings from /etc/asound.state into the mixer and alsactl store saves the current mixer settings to the file /etc/asound.state.

what I did was purge and install all my alsa packages again.

Like this:

sudo aptitude search "alsa" | grep "^i"

i alsa-base - ALSA driver configuration files
i alsa-oss - ALSA wrapper for OSS applications
i A alsa-utils - Utilities for configuring and using ALSA
i alsamixergui - graphical soundcard mixer for ALSA soundca
i gstreamer0.10-alsa - GStreamer plugin for ALSA


Then I do a :

sudo aptitude purge alsa-base ..... all of them


then I do:

sudo aptitude install alsa-base ... the same packages...


and after several test reboots all works..

ubuntu 12.04 - latest updates on a Dell l502x aka xps 15.


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This worked nicely.

I prolly managed to mess up my settings/rc-scripts while trying all those fixes in the recent months...