So I installed Kubuntu 10.10 only to find it’s now using pulseaudio. In all honesty it seems to work fine with one exception. Kmix the system tray volume manager & mixer only showed pulseaudio channels instead of my standard alsa channels. I could access them fine by going to command prompt and typing alsamixer, but in kmix it was a no go. So I went on the hunt to see what I could figure out.

After a bit of googling I found the following steps could restore kmix to it’s former alsamixer glory:

• Close Kmix by right-clicking on it in the system tray & clicking quit
• in konsole run the following command

kquitapp kmix && KMIX_PULSEAUDIO_DISABLE=1 kmix

• You should now be able to access your normal alsa channels via kmix

To make it run on on startup I did the following:

• open kate or your favorite bash editor
• add the following code to the document

#!/bin/bash kquitapp kmix && KMIX_PULSEAUDIO_DISABLE=1 kmix

• save the document to ~/.kde/Autostart
• make the document executable

chmod 755 ~/.kde/Autostart/kmixfix

• Log out and back in and you should now have your normal alsa channels back in kmix upon login

This is just a simple fix and I’m sure there are much cleaner ways to get it to run on startup. But it works for me and I now have all my mixer channels back in kmix where they belong.