Dear Dr. Theopolis....

I have been running flavors of Suse full time for about a year now. I have really enjoyed almost every aspect of using Linux as my main OS, but there have been a couple annoying aspects. One of these minor annoyances has been using my Dell convenience base/docking station with my D series notebook. I keep a set of speakers plugged into the station, so I can have nice sound when I am docked. In Windows XP this works fine, and I get audio out of the speakers when I am docked, and out of the laptop speakers when I am not docked. In Suse though, I have always had to plug the speakers into the headphone output on the notebook - not the docking station - if I wanted to hear sound from the external speakers.

I am now running Suse 10.2, and decided to give the external speaker thing another try. In Gnome, I opened up the Volume Control, then clicked on the File menu, change device, and chose the SigmaTel device. Now, I had an extra slider labeled Digital-1. I slid this to full, and BAM! I had sound from the external speaker. The volume level is controlled ONLY by the external speakers, not the general volume slider in the icon tray.

Something interesting about this is that I can choose "Mute" in the general volume control, and it does not disable the sound output from the docking station, it only disables the internal speakers. So I can control the internal speaker volume seperately from the external speakers.

If you want to enable the digital output in KDE, go into KMix through the volume control, click on the "switches" tab, and click the little radio button. The alignment is kind of wierd on this screen, the button doesn't seem to have a label.