Notes for aumix =============== aumix now also has a GUI interface, based on GTK. This is packaged as a separate package "aumix-gtk", because making that the standard version would mean that everyone that wants to use aumix would have to install the X libraries as well as the GTK libraries. Note that the aumix-gtk package has also support for the console and can completely replace the aumix package. Hints: ===== 1. Disabling auto save and restore There is an init.d script that saves the mixer settings upon shutdown, and restores them (as soon as possible) upon booting. If you don't want this, put exit 0 as the second line in /etc/init.d/aumix (or /etc/init.d/aumix-gtk). 2. Suppressing modprobe error messages Note that you may see error messages like this: "modprobe: modprobe: Can't locate module sound-slot-1" on the console at start up, or in /var/log/syslog. This is caused by /etc/init.d/aumix trying to load mixer settings for all /dev/mixer* devices. Unless your system is using devfs, you will probably have more /dev/mixer* device nodes than physical mixer devices in your system. Suppressing modprobe error messages for nonexistent mixer devices is simply a matter of creating dummy aliases for those modules. On Debian systems, these aliases go in files under the /etc/modutils directory. If you already have a file containing sound or other module definitions for your system, add them there. Otherwise, create a file called /etc/modutils/sound-dummy and add them there. For example, if the error message complains about sound-slot-1 and sound-service-1-0, you would add the following to the file: alias sound-slot-1 off alias sound-service-1-0 off Replace the module names above with the names reported on your system. After saving the file, run "update-modules" once. (All of this must be done as root.) As mentioned above, systems using the devfs filesystem don't have this problem, since devfs dynamically creates device nodes in the filesystem for devices actually present. For more information about this, see Documentation/filesystems/devfs/README in your Linux kernel source or kernel-doc-2.4.18 package. 3. Notes for ALSA users If you also have the Debian ALSA packages installed, the aumix init.d script will detect this and refuse to touch the mixer. ALSA users seem to be touchy people... :-) If you don't wish to use the ALSA stuff, e.g. since you only access ALSA in OSS emulation mode, you can forbid aumix execution at boot/shutdown on creating the file /etc/default/aumix.stop . Remove this file if you wish to use aumix for saving/restoring again. The aumix-alsa package has been removed, as the new ALSA libraries are not compatible with the old ones, and no documentation can be found on how to use the new ones. As the newest ALSA driver works fine with aumix without ALSA support, specific ALSA support has been dropped upstream. Perhaps that some day it'll return... If you're knowledgeable with ALSA stuff, feel free to contact aumix@packages.debian.org to help out. The Debian maintainer works closely with the aumix upstream maintainer.