Wow, setting the volume to zero is very helpful of pulseaudio /* end sarcasm */. Anyway, going by my .xsession-errors, my post upgrade issues don't seem to be volume related, at least not yet. I think they might have to do with virtualbox, but am not sure yet. I'm installing wheezy in another virtual machine as I write to see how things go with gnome there, since reports on the web seem to be it works fine. If it works in the fresh vm, then it's not virtualbox. If I get the same thing in the new vm, then it's probably virtualbox. In that case, I need to decide if I want to move over to the current 4.2.x release tree, since I stay one major release behind. If I can't figure out what's going on, I'll probably get on the orca list, and post my .xsession-errors though I'm tempted to just post it here and see if someone else here can tell me what's wrong without getting onto yet another list. As far as I can tell, the x server is coming up fine, gnome seems to be the problem. I'm running by using startx BTW, I want to figure out gnome itself before I try to figure out gdm. Who knows, when I solve the gnome issues, that may solve the gdm problems too. I'll post back with progress, since at least one person indicated interest. Greg On Mon, Jul 01, 2013 at 05:28:56PM -0500, Adam Myrow wrote: > 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. > _______________________________________________ > Speakup mailing list > Speakup at linux-speakup.org > http://linux-speakup.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/speakup > -- web site: http://www.gregn..net gpg public key: http://www.gregn..net/pubkey.asc skype: gregn1 (authorization required, add me to your contacts list first) -- Free domains: http://www.eu.org/ or mail dns-manager at EU.org