Ubuntu: Up and Running

Sound

Sound cards these days generally stick to rigidly defined protocols, so you’ll rarely have problems with them. However, you may still wish to configure certain sound options to your taste. You can do this using the Sound Preferences window, available by selecting System → Preferences → Sound, which results in the window shown in Figure 3-24.

Figure 3-24. The Sound Preferences window

In addition to a volume slider and a checkbox for muting audio, this window displays five main tabs. We’ll look at each one in the following subsections.

Sound Effects

This tab lets you choose the sound theme. By default, the theme will be Ubuntu. If other themes are available you can select them (or choose to not use a theme and so turn sounds off) using the “Sound theme” drop-down menu. Underneath there you can also choose your preferred alert sound and choose whether to enable window and button sounds by checking the associated box.

Hardware

If you don’t know what sound hardware you computer uses, you are best advised to avoid this tab for now, but if you still have sound problems after trying everything else, you can try changing the settings here to see whether that helps. To do this, select a device to configure and then use the Profile drop-down menu to configure it.

Input

Here, you can specify the input volume with a slider, or mute input entirely by checking the Mute checkbox. You can also test ...