On my IBM Thinkpad X31 I had the little annoying problem that every time I rebooted my volume was completely muted. It’s no real problem because setting it with alsamixer is just a matter of seconds but it’s just really annoying…

The solution is called amixer and also part of the alsa utilities and should be installed on your system. It’s an commandline tool to set the volume and unmute the different mixers.
After reading through the manpage I figered the following to be what I wanted

amixer set Master 100% unmute && amixer set PCM 70% unmute

Just add it to your /etc/conf.d/local.start so it is applied on bootup

echo "amixer set Master 100% unmute && amixer set PCM 70% unmute" >> /etc/conf.d/local.start

and your volume settings will be set now at boot.

Hf

btw: I don’t know why on my workstation the volume is saved on reboot and on my Thinkpad X31 its not but as long as setting volume at bootup works now with amixer I won’t complain ;)