Question:
On Ubuntu 11.10, I have no sound volume control as root.
I know this from earlier versions, as root you just had to manually start /usr/bin/pulseaudio, and then you got it.
This is still so. But as of 11.10, when I start /usr/bin/pulseaudio, I've got no more sound.
Note that I can view flash, movies, mp3s/oggs etc. without problems, but as soon as I start pulseaudio, all the sound is gone. When I pkill pulseaudio, sound is back.
Now, till now it has only been annoying, and I simply used alsamixer on the console to control volume.
Now, I want to watch a flash movie on youtube, but the sound volume is just too low to understand anything without holding my ears less close than 1 mm to the speaker...
Now I wanted to amplify the sound volume.
So I first looked into installing a alsa amplifier, and found this:
http://alien.slackbook.org/blog/adding-an-alsa-software-pre-amp-to-fix-low-sound-levels/
but /etc/asound.conf is not present on my system...
So I looked into something pulseaudio:
http://r8n.org/amplify-linux-sound-output-for-quiet-laptop-seakers-using-pulseaudio-ladsp-plugin/
I installed the swh plugin and the pavucontrol:
apt-get install swh-plugins
apt-get install pavucontrol
It seems to amplify well, as I see by the graphical output.
But I still hear nothing because of my problem with pulseaudio...
What can I do ?
I have a 64 bit system, in case that makes a difference.