Re: [gentoo-user] gnome complains about "no mixer elements and/or device" on login

[Holly Bostick]

Nick Rout schreef:
> When I log into gnome I get a dialog with the following message:
>
> "Sorry, no mixer elements and/or devices found"
>
> Advcie from google and forums.g.o seems to point to the following
> likely solutions:
>
> 1. make sure user has ability to do audio - yes I can, and everything
>  I run in gnome produces audio output when it should (mplayer, xmms,
>  mpg123, xine, whatever)
>
> 2. run gst-register-0.8 - done it, more than once. Doesn't complain
> about any problems, but makes no difference even after a reboot.
>
> Thats about a summary of the suggested fixes and the results. I
> figured that the error seemed to be on running gnome-volume-control,
> so when i run it from an xterm I get the following:

I would suggest:

Open the GNOME control panel and check the following settings:

Sound: Is "enable sound system on startup" checked or not? Just note,
for the time being.

If it is set, then you likely need to check rc-update show, to make sure
the esound service is started.
This will route everything GNOME through the esd sound server. This may
or may not be how you want to run it.

If it is not set, then everything should be running through ALSA-- but
GNOME may not be prepared to deal with that, as it expects to run ESD.

You can either 'fix' GNOME so it runs through ALSA, or you can run ESD.

If you want to 'fix' GNOME, go to "Multimedia systems' and basically
screw around with the audio sinks until you can get test sounds from
both tests. On my system, this requires that the standard output and
standard source be set to OSS (Alsa seems to hang or crash, but since I
have ALSA OSS emulation on, I don't worry about it, because it's still
using ALSA anyway).

Then turn off esd (rc-update del esound default).

Log out and in, and hopefully GNOME should now use the ALSA (OSS) devices.

If you want to use ESD, then in the Multimedia section, set the output
and source to ESD, and make sure that esound is running in rc-update (if
it is not already running, then try starting it with /etc/init.d/esound
start). Make sure that the 'enable sound server at startup' is set in
the Sound panel, log out and back in, and ESD should work.

Oh, and whatever route you choose, you probably want to remove the mixer
from your panel, then re-add it to prevent other panel weirdnesses that
seem to occur when you have to do this (which you always do, because the
gnome-mixer-applet is apparently so stupid that it can't detect the
environment properly; I've never had it work out-of-the-box. Ever. And
I've been using GNOME for quite a while).

Hope this helps,
Holly
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