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Hi all! I'm working on a personal project as a gift for a friend of mine - a "custom OS" based on the movie Alien. It is an Arch boot CD I'm customizing using the archiso scripts. It boots with a plymouth theme, and auto logs into an OpenBox session with a "cool-retro-term" session opened fullscreen in a custom theme. In the background, systemd jobs play background sounds. I do not use pulse audio, just alsa for sound.
I have two test systems (ASUS laptop and Thinkpad laptop). The ASUS laptop plays the sounds fine, but the Thinkpad does not. I think the reason is that my HDMI card is card 0 when I boot from the ISO, but when the Thinkpad boots from its normal Arch installation, the "Intel PCH" card is card 0. I can specify the proper device with "aplay -D", but of course that doesn't really help because I'm not making this ISO to work on one particular machine, I'm trying to make it generic.
My question: is there any way to configure ALSA (or even Pulse Audio, if necessary) to do the following:
1. Automatically select the built-in speakers (for laptops) or built-in speaker output (for desktops).
2. Ensure that this output is unmuted.
I'd be willing to do something crazy like use Pulse to create a single sink that outputs to every device on the computer in the hopes that one of them is audible, but I don't know how difficult that would be. I'd appreciate any input you have. Thanks!
Last edited by brenns10 (2017-05-21 20:48:42)
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