Running kde 4.8.5 under Mint 12. My kmix volume mixer has suddenly changed to a horrid-looking vertical thing with one slider above a second, and it's cut off at the bottom. There used to be a button that would bring up the full mixer, but I can't see that anymore. Any ideas? Can't seem to get a screen shot of it, sorry.

The "one button above a second" is probably because you use PulseAudio, which lets you adjust the volume for individual applications. The Mixer button should be at the bottom, but I guess you can't see it because it's cut off (can you move it with Alt+left mouse button?). You should still be able to reach the Mixer window by right clicking on the icon -> Restore.

In newer versions, starting from 4.9 I believe, the alignment of the popup will follow your KMix settings.

The restore did it. Not sure why I didn't see that before. Thanks. Alt-left doesn't seem to do anything. Is it possible that my system somehow "suddenly" decided to use pulse as it's audio system rather than alsa, oss or something else? I thought I had alsa before, but I also use Skype, which I think requires pulse.

PulseAudio isn't really in the same "tier" as ALSA, OSS, etc. I don't use it myself so I don't know much about it, but you could check your Multimedia settings in System Settings and see if you have PulseAudio as your output device.

My output device is set to my sound card. My backend in "phonon" is set to VLC because I had problems with gstreamer memory leaks. I'm not sure where I'd look for pulseaudio. I'm sure it's installed because skype uses it (and I think requires it). I do have lots of audio problems, mostly stemming from the hardware I suspect. I'm running on a laptop, so I don't have a lot of choice in my hardware settings.

Pulseaudio will only appear as your audio output device in System Settings if KDE was built without Pulseaudio support, or it was not possible to reach the agent in Pulseaudio responsible for applying the KDE settings.

The easiest way i've found is to see if Pulseaudio is running:

Code: Select all

ps aux | grep -i pulseaudio