So I used “alsamixer” to set the correct capture source and that worked but after a reboot it was set back to Mic. Then I found about “alsactl” which should store the current setting by doing “alsactl store” but that did not work either since I think pulseaudio does not look into that.

Uninstalling pulseaudio as some people suggested solved the Mic problem but caused many other problems when playing many applications that want to play audio (like flash apps such as youtube and video apps…etc),  this is an ALSA problem that pulseaudio try to solve AFAIK.

The solution that I found was to use “amixer” which can be run from the command line with the parameters to set “Front Mic” as the capture source. Here is the full command for my device:

amixer -c 0 cset numid=6,iface=MIXER,name='Input Source' 1

To explain the previous command:
[-c 0] is to select the first sound card (the only card in my laptop, but if you have two cards they will be 0 and 1)
[cset] is to tell amixer that you want to set these settings
[numid, iface, and MIXER] are information about your card and what source you want to change the settings for, and here is how I get these information:

[fad@fad ~]$ amixer -c0 contents
numid=2,iface=MIXER,name='Master Playback Switch'
 ; type=BOOLEAN,access=rw------,values=2
 : values=on,on
numid=1,iface=MIXER,name='Master Playback Volume'
 ; type=INTEGER,access=rw---R--,values=2,min=0,max=31,step=0
 : values=14,14
 | dBscale-min=-46.50dB,step=1.50dB,mute=0
......
......
numid=6,iface=MIXER,name='Input Source'
 ; type=ENUMERATED,access=rw------,values=1,items=2
 ; Item #0 'Mic'
 ; Item #1 'Front Mic'
 : values=0
......
......

And as you can see in the previous result the part that am looking for is (numid=6,iface=MIXER,name=’Input Source’) and it lists Mic=0 and Front Mic=1 but the selected values=0 which is for Mic and I need to set it to 1

Here is the command again:

amixer -c 0 cset numid=6,iface=MIXER,name='Input Source' 1

put this command in a script file and make it run whenever you login to your profile (I tried adding it to the rc.local so it will execute with every boot but that didn’t work, since I think the settings is applied during login time for each user)

For KDE users you can put that script (or a link to it) under:

/home/<username>/.kde/Autostart/

or through the KDE “System Settings”>”Startup and Shutdown”>”Autostart”

Now at each login this command should set the correct input source which pulseaudio will use it.

Whenever I change from Fedora 8 or Windows XP to the new Fedora 9  or vice versa the time of my machine will change, it will go backward or forward with a fixed offset, and I knew it is a problem with timezone. So before I explain the problem I would like to mention that each machine has a clock that works even if the machine is turned off, using a battery that is connected to the motherboard, and when the operating system boots it will read the time from that clock.

For Windows OS, the time that is shown to you in the taskbar is the same time of the hardware clock, and when you change your time in Windows, it will update the hardware clock to reflect the same change. So let say that you are in a city with timezone ” -6 ” and Windows is set to that zone, then the hardware clock will have the time of that zone also. However, Unix, and Unix compatible OS like Linux, assumes the hardware clock to be set to the UTC “coordinated universal time” (which is also called GMT) and it will calculate the local time based on the selected timezone (by adding the offset to the time).

If you have a system with dual boot Windows and Linux you will have this problem, but lucky we are that Linux has the option to assume the hardware clock to be the local-time instead of UTC and it will ack like Windows and that will solve the problem.

So after remembering all of that I tried to loacate this option under my Feroa 9 which tells it to treat the machine clock as a local-time instead of UTC, but I could not find it any where, and after some digging I discovered that since I installed KDE4 only with my new installation, the tool that allows this is based on Gnome desktop and it is called “system-config-time”. But I am still wondering why KDE4 does not have a GUI for that!! even in the older version!!

So I installed this tool and I found that the option for UTC time is checked and I have to uncheck it to resolve the problem.

Unfortunately it did not work and it gave me an error message after I clicked the OK button and it did not change the settings:


File "/usr/lib/python2.5/shutil.py", line 41, in copyfile
raise Error, "`%s` and `%s` are the same file" % (src, dst)
shutil.Error: `/usr/share/zoneinfo/America/Chicago` and `/etc/localtime` are the same file


Finally after more google search I found this command line program “timeconfig” (which is text version of the system-config-date) which I used to successfully change the way Linux uses the time stored in my machine.

From my understanding, both tools the GUI “system-config-date” and the text based “timeconfig” are developed by Redhat, and since they use Gnome as their default destop management they tend to build their tools based on that. However, I like KDE more since it provides me with things that Gnome can’t. So do I have to suffer for that?

Is this Redhat problem or KDE should develope all of these things?

Any way, I am happy now that my problem is fixed, but I hope the option will be available in KDE 4.1.