Re: Extension to Volume Control & General Questions

["John (J5) Palmieri" <johnp martianrock com>]

On Thu, 2005-04-07 at 16:25 -0400, Jordan Saunders wrote:
> Since my foray into Linux, there have been a few things that have
> annoyed me and a few more that have made me curious. Firstly, the volume
> control panel applet can only adjust one channel at a time, and my
> master channel only controls the front speakers. So when it's at zero,
> there is still sound from my back speakers. I would like to make it a
> project of mine to fix this to get a better grounding in Linux
> programming, but I'm not sure if it'll be accepted into the CVS. What I
> would like to do is change it so that you can select more than one
> channel to change at a time, and to unify their volume. I don't want to
> step on anyone's feet by coding this, but I would like to help out with
> Gnome, and this is the first thing that I saw that I didn't like and I
> could fix.

I would say just fixing the volume control applet so the one slider
controls both front and back speakers is the way to go.  Having more
than one slider seems wrong in the applet since the volume control
capplet should have a way of individually adjusting the channels. 

> Another thing I've wondered about is testing things like the core
> desktop environment or library. It just wouldn't be very practical to
> reinstall Gnome every time one makes a tiny modification, so what would
> be the "routine" in that case?

You just make install the library you are working on, not the entire
desktop.  Also check out jhbuild.  Using jhbuild will allow you to do
development without touching your main desktop. 

-- 
John (J5) Palmieri
Associate Software Engineer
Desktop Group
Red Hat, Inc.
Blog: http://martianrock.com