MInt 13: volume control doesn't change volume

This article involves choosing a non-default sound device.

Description:

1.When Adobe flash player 11 played online music, it went too fast. As soon as a certain point was buffered, the player jumped to it; in other word, if at this time the player was playing at 1:20, and the media was buffered till 2:30, then the player skipped the music between 1:20 and 2:30, and jumped to the 2:30 point. (I hope I have made myself understood) This is similar for local music player Banshee, though it did not buffer the music.

2. When a music or a video was played, pressing volume up/down button on the keyboard or directly using the volume control on desktop did not change the volume at all. 

Solutions: 

I first suspected that the flash player was not working properly. However, while I was re-installing the plugin, I happened to download a music, and realize that it didn't work properly in my disk as well. Then I opened the control center, and realized the cause related to the sound device. I had two listed sound device, and the default choice was the HDMI one, as shown below. I chose the built-in one, and it worked sometimes, but after reboot, the device in work became the HDMI again.

Then this thread worked out.

And here's my output

 $ sudo cat /proc/asound/modules 

[sudo] password for ao: 

 0 snd_hda_intel

 1 snd_hda_intel

Yes, there were actually no difference between these two; I believe if you get this output as well, you may refer to the index of item in your Sound Preferences in Control Center, (i.e. the first= index=0)

Follow the instructions in the link, and hopefully it will work fine.

Install MInt 13 via USB

Yes, I knew that this topic has been mentioned in many places. And here is a good example (installation along with Win7) However, maybe it does not hurt to provide some tips. So here we go!

Create a Live CD/USB

Here is a nice place to start. I have tried all three ways, but it seemed only the first one work: ImageWriter crashed in Windows XP for no good reason (I "successfully" burned the USB, but it turned out that no booting medium was found when I booted through it). In Ubuntu 11, this software caused an error when it tried to unmount USB disk before finishing all the work (I am still unable to figure out why it needs to unmount it). Then I moved on to terminal. As for this method, here is a note you may want for finding USB disk under command line: In terminal, type in sudo fdisk -l. You may get similar results like this:

Here, I got
Disk /dev/sdb: 3918 MB, 3918495744 bytes
whose size is equivalent to my USB's. And
Disk /dev/sdb1: 941 MB, 941621248 bytes
is a partition of my USB disk (since I have made it a Live CD/USB). So /dev/sdb should be used as the path, that is
sudo dd if=~/path_of_linux_mint_iso of=/dev/sdb oflag=direct bs=1M
Notice that the device is refered to as /dev/sdx instead of /media/xxx. The first one is the device node assigned for your device, the other one is where the device is actually mounted (so that you can browse your files). Also note that your USB type could be FAT if you are using Windows.

Install Mint

This step is easy yet time-consuming. Insert your USB, reboot the computer and set USB to highest priority in BIOS boot option. If all work as expected, you should see a menu asking you to choose installing Mint (which is the first choice). Press , and you will enter a desktop, in which there is an icon saying "install Linux Mint". Double click it, and you should be all set.

Two tips here:
1. If a booting medium cannot be found when you boot via a USB, the reason could be that your USB lost connection to the computer. In that case, it helps just to reboot the computer and reinsert your USB. My Kingston USB worked well that way.
2. If the estimated language package downloading appears unreasonable (e.g.several hundreds/thousands minutes), you can skip it by clicking the bottom triangle and then click the "skip" button appeared.

Keep patient, and you should be fine.

Experiencing Linux Mint 13 (Maya)

Finally I made it to complete the installation of Mint 13 with Cinnamon and done a lot of configuration.

I have to admit that Mint is quite easy to use for a CS newbie who wants to advance to Linux tech from Windows. However, there are still lots of stuff (and lots of fun too!) to do for Mint to work as you want. That said, I am going to post some of the problems I met and solutions (search, improve, and share) in the hope that I may save some efforts of the public and some of mine in case I may need to re-solve some.

Anyway, thanks to the development team of Mint!