KDE Volume, Part 1

Oh Linux… you keep my life interesting. If I wanted a computer that just worked, I’d buy an iPad.
Here’s a tip for anyone running Kubuntu. Don’t be alarmed if every time you log onto your machine the volume is muted and when you unmute the volume you find that next time you log in it is muted again. This is the normal and expected behaviour. By normal I mean this is how KMix has behaved every single time I’ve installed Kubuntu. Now if you are like me you opened up KMix and brought up the settings. There you would have seen the “Restore volumes on login” option. This option will have most likely been checked at which point you thought WTF??? You’ve just been punked by the KDE team.
On my desktop simply deselecting this option fixed the problem. Yes, you read right, turning off the option to restore volume at login enables the system to restore volume at login. Presumably somewhere in the KMix source there is a != where there should be a ==.
Unfortunately this little trick didn’t work on my laptop. After spending some time today looking for the solution I came across this bug report.
Comment #14 had my solution. Deselect the option as before, close KMix and at the command line run,

$ kmixctrl -s

Next time you reboot the volume with restore to where it was set with KMix. Not that I tested it, but I suspect this is a one time thing. As in, changing the setting from where they are will result in the old inconsistency, however I don’t really care. I just want the volume unmuted every time I login.