suggestions on configuring sound cards

[Joseph C. Lininger]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA256

Hi all,

I'm currently working on a series of CD based Linux systems which are
designed to be useful in a variety of circumstances. They're not
designed specifically for the blind, but I and the other developers have
decided that where ever possible we will make them accessible to the
widest variety of people.

Anyway, what I'm writing about is that I would like possible suggestions
on how I can deal with a potential access problem. As a lot of you know,
alsa mutes your sound card by default when the driver is loaded. One can
set the volumes and then use alsactl, but for a volitile environment
such as that on a system run from a CD that's obviously not really an
option. This means that even if one passes boot parameters requesting
speakup be loaded, if they're using software speach then they have to
set volumes using something like amixer before the speach will work. I
can't automate this since control names, acceptable values, etc. vary
from card to card and I have no idea what hardware people might use this
on. Does anyone have experience dealing with this problem, and is there
a better way than forcing one to manually set reasonable volumes on
his/her sound card? If it helps or matters, these systems are Gentoo
based. Looking forward to hearing your ideas. Thanks in advance.
Joe
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.9 (MingW32)

iQEcBAEBCAAGBQJKeXXZAAoJEMh8jNraUiwqKGkH/1Jrc8ctW4vYDKIcB3GbjS6V
nPygzKovnp1ncvcDhhmHgOWLJhDGpdtofjCPDlMKHOQlkwRtjDByI/xLo9ZeXBtf
df6Jx7xSub+UgBoZ4opA/BnVCMH+DsyjW/pHm24J8qkQsDUeC+MEw1O//Ssz8JE5
rMudU5ngnUQ92buQR2nXRuOgnYkIFrgNGPOGAwFsDJIT0nRAe7iK9z75aIVe8QoQ
qztPFYEBoSUlafmrxRF+Js3lRYamD84gg6LLcisjbA6iBf86mvISwdkRht3D4GbY
BoJk5osSn+JEPPOKBScx3bKO57TCH+h0+STs36TAYB/VkJ90cZIhycXQBWZNvcw=
=l//S
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----