Hello, I am slowly turning my old desktop into my htpc. I recently installed linux mint as my os. I am using a headphone extension jack(3.5 male on each end) running from my onboard sound and into my lcd tv. At the moment I am using the speakers built in to my lcd tv and find that I have to turn my volume on my tv all the way up and still have trouble hearing it when watching movies. I have check the obvious volume settings on my os and they are all turned up. When watching regular tv (htpc not hooked) the sound is much 10 times louder when compared to watching a movie via my htpc. Anyone have an idea what I need to do?


My second question is that I bought a Dynex wireless desktop card and cannot for the life of me figure out how to get it installed. I posted my question on the ubuntu forums but never got any feedback. Tried using ndiswrapper and install drives from the cd that was included but ndiswrapper is saying the drivers are invalid. Iwconfig doesn't see the card either.


Any help on this questions would be greatly appreciated. Thanks

First your sound problems. If you have alsa installed you can bring up a mixer by typing alsamixer into a terminal. A GUI like Kmix or QAmix is good too. Play with the output volumes to see if it changes anything.

For the wireless card. You don't say what the chipset is that it uses. Type in lspci in a terminal, and it should list all of the cards. NDISWrapper is usually used for Broadcom chips. I use this in my Dell laptop (built in WiFi) and a PCI card from Buffalo., both with broadcom chips. Different chips will use a different driver. Sometimes you can use a driver from a different card, if the chip is the same.

Once you have the driver installed. I use Knetworkmanager to connect to my access point. It can store the password in Kwallet.

As you can tell, I use a lot of the KDE desktop programs. They seem to work best for me. You don't have to use the KDE desktop to use the KDE programs

Thanks for the response waterhead. Linux mint comes with a similar gui volume control. I do have this turned up all the way. I guess I forgot to mention that the sound is much louder and easier to hear when I hook it up to my computer speakers using the exact same settings. My computer speakers consist of 2 speakers and a sub. Basically my computer itself is not producing enough power to get the same effect that I would as if just watching tv or using my powered computer speakers. My question is, is there an easy way around this? Would a new sound card produce a greater output than the onboard one?


I have also done some digging around and found that the Dynex wireless desktop card uses the Atheros chipset. I am currently at work so I am unable to try lspci. I'll give it a try when I get a spare moment. So now that you know what the chipset is do you have any idea has how to go about installing it? I am completely clueless? Thanks

Thanks for the response waterhead. Linux mint comes with a similar gui volume control. I do have this turned up all the way. I guess I forgot to mention that the sound is much louder and easier to hear when I hook it up to my computer speakers using the exact same settings. My computer speakers consist of 2 speakers and a sub. Basically my computer itself is not producing enough power to get the same effect that I would as if just watching tv or using my powered computer speakers. My question is, is there an easy way around this? Would a new sound card produce a greater output than the onboard one?

You computer speakers probably include an amplifier, this doesn't say much. The sound card will output at line level, so the question is do you have PCM turned up enough? I suggest alsamixer too run from a shell prompt. Just because Linux mint comes with a gui volume doesn't mean that its showing the right parameters.

If it is indeed an Atheros chipset, then you may need the MadWifi driver. But, I would hold off doing anything until you know for sure.

http://madwifi.org/