Bug#486809: gnome-control-center: Sound Preferences, Multiple Sound Cards and Card Order

Steve Fosdick dbugs at pelvoux.nildram.co.uk
Wed Jun 18 09:38:25 UTC 2008


Package: gnome-control-center
Version: 1:2.22.1-1
Severity: normal


I have a machine with two sound cards - the integrated one and an external
studio-grade one.

The gnome-sound-properties component of gnome-control-center allowed me
to see the sound cards by a descriptive name, e.g "RME Hammerfall" rather
than the ALSA hardware name (e.g. hw:0) and choose which one I wanted to use
for which type of application which I did, choosing the studio card for the
category "Music & Movies".

Some time later I rebuilt the kernel and, after doing this, the wrong
sound card was being used for playing music.  When I opened
gnome-sound-properties a second time to check what was going on each
of the drop down lists for the various categories had the same descriptive
names selected as when I has last closed it but in each case with
'(not connected)' after the name.

Clicking on each drop down list and re-chosing the sound card I want seemed
to solve the problem and sound now plays on the correct card.

My suspicion is that re-building the kernel changed the order in which the
cards were found at boot time and therefore which card was hw:0 and which
was hw:1, that gnome-sound-properties had saved the hw:0 style ALSA name
with my preference and that the not connected message meant that ALSA no
longer reported the same descriptive name against that hw:0 style name.

Obviously it is the particular card I want to pick in the preferences
and not an index into the list of sound cards found at boot.  It would be
better if the descriptive name offered in the drop down list was all that
was saved as my preference and that some daemon queried the list of cards
from ALSA when GNOME was stared and maybe also listened to hotplug events
to establish the correspondance between descriptive names and hardware names.

-- System Information:
Debian Release: lenny/sid
  APT prefers testing
  APT policy: (500, 'testing')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)

Kernel: Linux 2.6.25.7-ecrins
Locale: LANG=en_GB.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_GB.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash

Versions of packages gnome-control-center depends on:
ii  capplets-data     1:2.22.1-1             configuration applets for GNOME 2 
ii  desktop-file-util 0.15-1                 Utilities for .desktop files
ii  gnome-desktop-dat 2.22.2-1               Common files for GNOME 2 desktop a
ii  gnome-icon-theme  2.22.0-1               GNOME Desktop icon theme
ii  gnome-menus       2.22.2-1               an implementation of the freedeskt
ii  gnome-settings-da 2.22.2.1-1             GNOME settings daemon
ii  libart-2.0-2      2.3.20-2               Library of functions for 2D graphi
ii  libatk1.0-0       1.22.0-1               The ATK accessibility toolkit
ii  libbonobo2-0      2.22.0-1               Bonobo CORBA interfaces library
ii  libbonoboui2-0    2.22.0-1               The Bonobo UI library
ii  libc6             2.7-10                 GNU C Library: Shared libraries
ii  libcairo2         1.6.4-1+b1             The Cairo 2D vector graphics libra
ii  libdbus-1-3       1.2.1-2                simple interprocess messaging syst
ii  libdbus-glib-1-2  0.76-1                 simple interprocess messaging syst
ii  libebook1.2-9     2.22.1-1               Client library for evolution addre
ii  libfontconfig1    2.5.0-2                generic font configuration library
ii  libfreetype6      2.3.5-1+b1             FreeType 2 font engine, shared lib
ii  libgconf2-4       2.22.0-1               GNOME configuration database syste
ii  libglade2-0       1:2.6.2-1              library to load .glade files at ru
ii  libglib2.0-0      2.16.3-2               The GLib library of C routines
ii  libgnome-desktop- 2.22.2-1               Utility library for loading .deskt
ii  libgnome-menu2    2.22.2-1               an implementation of the freedeskt
ii  libgnome-window-s 1:2.22.1-1             Utility library for getting window
ii  libgnome2-0       2.20.1.1-1             The GNOME 2 library - runtime file
ii  libgnomecanvas2-0 2.20.1.1-1             A powerful object-oriented display
ii  libgnomekbd2      2.22.0-1               GNOME library to manage keyboard c
ii  libgnomekbdui2    2.22.0-1               User interface library for libgnom
ii  libgnomeui-0      2.20.1.1-1             The GNOME 2 libraries (User Interf
ii  libgnomevfs2-0    1:2.22.0-3             GNOME Virtual File System (runtime
ii  libgstreamer-plug 0.10.19-2              GStreamer libraries from the "base
ii  libgstreamer0.10- 0.10.19-3              Core GStreamer libraries and eleme
ii  libgtk2.0-0       2.12.9-3               The GTK+ graphical user interface 
ii  libhal1           0.5.11-1               Hardware Abstraction Layer - share
ii  libice6           2:1.0.4-1              X11 Inter-Client Exchange library
ii  libmetacity0      1:2.22.0-1             library of lightweight GTK2 based 
ii  libnautilus-exten 2.20.0-4               libraries for nautilus components 
ii  liborbit2         1:2.14.13-0.1          libraries for ORBit2 - a CORBA ORB
ii  libpanel-applet2- 2.20.3-3               library for GNOME Panel applets
ii  libpango1.0-0     1.20.2-2               Layout and rendering of internatio
ii  libpixman-1-0     0.10.0-2               pixel-manipulation library for X a
ii  libpng12-0        1.2.27-1               PNG library - runtime
ii  libpopt0          1.10-3                 lib for parsing cmdline parameters
ii  libslab0          0.9.8.svn.20070430-1.1 beautification app library file
ii  libsm6            2:1.0.3-1+b1           X11 Session Management library
ii  libstartup-notifi 0.9-1                  library for program launch feedbac
ii  libx11-6          2:1.0.3-7              X11 client-side library
ii  libxcursor1       1:1.1.9-1              X cursor management library
ii  libxft2           2.1.12-2               FreeType-based font drawing librar
ii  libxklavier12     3.5-1                  X Keyboard Extension high-level AP
ii  libxml2           2.6.32.dfsg-2          GNOME XML library
ii  libxrandr2        2:1.2.2-2              X11 RandR extension library
ii  libxrender1       1:0.9.4-1              X Rendering Extension client libra
ii  libxss1           1:1.1.3-1              X11 Screen Saver extension library
ii  zlib1g            1:1.2.3.3.dfsg-12      compression library - runtime

Versions of packages gnome-control-center recommends:
ii  bzip2                         1.0.5-0.1  high-quality block-sorting file co
ii  evolution-data-server         2.22.1-1   evolution database backend server
ii  gnome-session                 2.22.2-1   The GNOME 2 Session Manager
ii  gnome-user-guide              2.22.1-1   GNOME user's guide

-- no debconf information






More information about the pkg-gnome-maintainers mailing list