Pulse Audio (was Re: speakup goes oops/bye-bye on wheezy)

[Adam Myrow]

I'm not sure whether this will help, but I wanted to share my experience 
with Pulse Audio in Wheezy.  When I first upgraded from Squeeze, I had 
pretty much no sound from Pulse Audio.  I ran into many of the same things 
others described.  Thankfully, I have a Braille display.  With that, I was 
able to log into Gnome, and get into the volume controls.  They can be 
accessed from the menu you get by pressing alt-control-tab.  What I 
discovered was that Pulse was constantly setting my master volume to zero. 
I have no idea why.  There is a control that just says "switch toggle 
button."  I hit space on that control, and it changed to "switch toggle 
button pressed."  I adjusted the master volume to an acceptable level, and 
Pulse has given me no trouble since.  I have no idea what the control 
actually does, but it sure did something.  I don't know how one would 
accomplish the same thing from the command line, but I figure there has to 
be a way.  I still can't play sound as root, but I don't consider that 
much of a loss.  I try to only use root for administrative tasks, so it's 
no big deal.  I hope this at least gives some ideas to everybody fighting 
with Pulse Audio.