[Sugar-devel] Fix Sound activity

[Daniel Drake]

Hi,

All OLPC OS releases including 8.2.1 have an annoying issue, where
activities can trash sound mixer settings. The result is that all
Sugar activities lose the ability to play sound (they are muted) and
sugar's volume control does not fix it. And unfortunately this becomes
a very common issue in deployments. Speak, Measure and/or Adobe Flash
are my key suspects in messing with sound levels.

Anyway, I've written an activity that restores the PCM mixer, which
acts as a workaround for this bug. Simply run the FixSound activity
every time you lose sound.

http://wiki.laptop.org/go/FixSound

The OS images being deployed in Paraguay and Nepal already have this
bug fixed, and it is also fixed in the F11-for-XO1 builds that will
hopefully reach deployment readiness in the not too distant future.

Daniel