On Wednesday 29 June 2005 01:19, Colin Murphy wrote:
I've recently introduced my dear, grey haired old mother to the delights of computers and, seeing as she is using one of my machines, she will be using Linux, specifically Suse 9.2.
While she has had a little experience of some Windows systems it's all fairly new to her, so watching her using a Linux desktop is quite revealing. It seems she gets stuck just as often with either OS, mainly with pop-ups and sudden change of focus of windows on the screen, along with silly things like typing e,s and c for the ESC key. We are using KDE along with applications like KMail. Obviously these things will come with practise and experience - the point to note being that the learning curve seems pretty much the same for Linux and Windows.
The killer app that has fired up my mothers keenness to use the computer is Skype and it is the sound element that has proved to be a real stumbling block for her. I have many years of Linux experience, though I'm no expert, and it is sound that always seems to cause me the greatest amount of grief also. This begs the question, are the sound features in Linux letting the Desktop usage side down?
The specific problem here with Skype was with setting up the 'voice capture' side of things. It works to a fashion now, after some Googling I started setting levels using alsamixer from a terminal, other mixers like KMix and KAMix didn't have a slider control for a 'Digital' element, which is required. Errrrrr Kmix does have a slider for digital it is labeled PCM i use Kmix only and have no problems with skype apart from the odd howl cause i cant stand headphones but even that is rare these days ,
You need the little red light to be on under the microphone slider a little mic gain to start with , The green lights above master and PCM both need to be on, PCM about half mast and Master volume to suit your self i split the master volume and set one speaker louder than the other this gets rid of the slight howl now and then . Theese settings are for Kmix and have worked ever since i first got skype (quite a while ago now ) You will normally find me nattering to Sid (sidders) as petenjr
It still isn't working quite right, this setting needs to be adjusted after every reboot - alsamixer isn't as GUI user friendly as I would want for my mother and is a cause of irritation. Can anyone tell me how I can set these in a more permanent fashion?
I have found the way Linux handles sound to be a very confusing subject, confusing for a user since almost all of the documentation seems to be for the developer arena. Is it now time for this to change and make all of the sound features more user friendly. I am not talking about playback, that has been fairly flawless in it's automatic configuration in any Suse install I've done in the past few years. I'm talking of more complicated things like recording and capturing from other sources.
I have found that most of the sound features seem to work well capture from most sources works well apart from i have not tried some of the more exotic digital formats aint got the gear aint likley to buy it either too expensive for me . The one thing i still cant work out is capturing video from DVD to disc . Oh and streaming audio i cant capture but have no tried recently and that is most likely just me doing something butt about face
Truth be told, I have no idea how well this stuff is handled in Windows either, nor do I care. I do know that if I have a problem trying to do some of this stuff in Linux and I turn to Google for help my head soon starts to spin with terms
like aRTs and ALSA and a seemingly fraught battle between then for domination of my speaker socket I have found recently that i have no problem with aRTS and the default KDE 3.4 settings work well i know some people say different but this may be with shall we say some more highly strung sound cards i use and a "Sound Blaster Live" (emu10k1) chip i have also used an Sound Blaster PCI64 that caused a bit if hassle but it worked as well mic PCM setting was as touchey as you like plus some look at it and howl or no audio , Had no problem with ALSA unless i try to enable the on-board sound chip then all hell breaks loose and sound is completely screwed so i dont use the on-board at all .
Pete . -- If Bill Gates had gotten LAID at High School do YOU think there would be a Microsoft ? Of course NOT ! You gotta spend a lot of time at your school Locker stuffing underware up your ass to think , I am going to take on the worlds Computer Industry -------:heard on Cyber Radio.:-------