An engineer's life around Kyoto

I have been in trouble over setting up my laptop Linux box (Panasonic T7) to enable the headphone output. I have been looking into PulseAudio sound system settings in the desktop menu to enable it, But recently, I found that I had to check both ALSA soundcard device driver and PulseAudio sound system configurations. Unfortunately, the headphone output switch was disabled in the ALSA configuration. What's worse, the configuration item is hidden by default! After that, I noticed that the microphone input is muted, I search around the configuration menus and found that the amplitude of the microphone is minimized in the hidden configuration item in the PulseAudio setting panel. Hmm, isn't the sound system too complicated and guiding information too few ?

It's been a long time since my last post. Recently, I bought a secondhand Panasonic T7 laptop PC. It was as much as seven thousand yen (about 76 USD), and I am pleasant for the price. I installed Debian 7.1 (wheezy) to the PC and set up Xfce desktop environment. Most of the things went well, but the X-Window system didn't recognize automatically that its touch pad device was circle and able to sense tapping operations. I was disappointed a while, but managed to write additional configurations for the X server with a help of the man page of Synaptics touch pad input driver. For reminder,  here it is: $ cat /etc/X11/xorg.conf Section "InputClass"     Identifier  "MyTouchPad"     MatchDriver      "synaptics"     Option        "TapButton1" "1"     Option        "CircularPad" "true"     Option  ...