Quote Originally Posted by tarpon
Quote Originally Posted by Stephen
For some reason that still baffles me as well the default volumes do not get saved once you run that setup so the system starts up with the speakers muted. Try running the alsamixer to setup your levels and and then I believe it is alsactl store to save the settings.
The things you suggest don't seem to fix the sticky part. A quick look with lsmod shows the plain sound modules load on reboot, not the alsa modules. Running alsa_init unloads them and loads the alsa modules.
Check to see if to see if the modules are in the /etc/modules if they are put a # character in front of the line or if you want remove the line.
Thanks for the detailed answer. Clears up a lot. Might be a good addition to the FAQ.

I was hoping that Knoppix could be an installer for long term Debian use, but looks like there may be too many twists and turns for that. Knoopix is great for what it is though. I use it as a diag and recovery tool. With NTFS added it's just that much better. Perfect distro for the try before you commit crowd.
It takes a little work but you can turn Knoppix into Debian eventually just get used to the system and start removing the packages one at a time that you do not need. Eventually the configuration files that are there from knoppix will be replaced by the default Debian ones if you let the system do that, it will always make a backup of the file with .dpkg-old on the end so you can compare the two if you do not like the new behavior. Then you can get around to removing the Knoppix specific packages and now you will have Debian.