There is a known "bug" (or maybe it's on purpose?) with Pulseaudio muting the sound every time the system boots up. Not sure whether it's DE independent or just in Gnome.

Apparently, the problem is that alsa-utils was removed from Pulseaudio, so a fast fix is to install alsa back and it works fine. However, I have had a bad time setting up Skype with alsa, so I don't want to follow this method.

Using either pacmd set-sink-mute 1 false or pacmd set-sink-volume 1 100 works once the system is booted, so I tried to put any of these commands in a script which runs at boot time, but neither of them it's working. The working output device is on index 1.

Firstly, I put them in rc.local, but Pulseaudio daemon is user specific, in fact, running pacmd as root says "Daemon not responding". Then, I tried to add them to crontab using @reboot, but no luck.

What else can I do?

Well as long as trying to install the alsa-utils package doesn't ask you to remove any parts of PA, re-install it and tell Alsa to use Pulse. Then when setting up Skype, put it through Pulse as per usual and it should be fine.

Weird, just installed alsa again and Skype settings didn't change. So I have both things working now, sound enabled by default and Skype.

yzT!

to save me searching,
-- can you provide a link to the known bug please.

Just found another fix while searching the bug report for you xD

The line that causes the problem is load-module module-device-restore in the file /etc/pulse/defaults.pa. Comment it out.

Just search for "Pulseaudio mute startup" and you will have tons of results reporting this issue, but generally in all of them the fix is to install alsa-utils. However in this one https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+s...io/+bug/592016 they talk about the fix I stated above.

1 members found this post helpful.

Hi

thanks for the link.

This should help a lot of people.

1) Don't forget to mention that /etc/pulse/defaults.pa is a system wide config and newbies will need sudo (or root powers) to edit

b) those who copied it to their home folder only need to edit their home file.

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Maybe you can make this a sticky until PA is fixed?

cheers


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trivia
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inputting slackware (as example) with other search terms yields no meaningful hits but I still think this is worthy of a sticky status request