Porteus

tldr; reboot Porteus at least once before trying to tackle any problems.

Symptom: A chain of fresh installs of Porteus to this Intel NUC, from the mmcblk device (sdcard) regardless of version (5.01, 5.1 Alpha), or DE (LXQT or XFCE) always has the audio showing up as "dummy" on the first boot, but the hardware seems to fix itself after the very first reboot.

Must be a timing/hardware issue that the box itself finally notices after the first reboot. Who knows what else is going on under the Nuc's hood that might not be optimal on the very first boot?

It is pointing to something in the hardware, possibly a timing issue that magically fixes itself on the first reboot from the mmcblk (sdcard) device. I couldn't duplicate this problem from a usb-stick fresh install!

Long story short - my own urban legend will be to ALWAYS reboot at least once before trying to resolve any issues with a fresh Porteus install. For that matter, any other distro will get the same treatment. I didn't see this for a long time since I always ended up rebooting doing other things after a fresh install anyway, but this time I caught it! This might be handy for those with all those little mini-pc's with all their ports.

Not a showstopper, but I don't want to chase ghosts on that very first initial boot on some hardware that wants to see a reboot after the initial install.

A difference between an install and a reboot is usually the changes the user has made during the initial boot. Try the second boot in Always Fresh mode.

Ah yes! But, in this instance, absolutely no changes were made other than calling up the volume control, and seeing "dummy output". Yet, simply rebooting once without changing anything, and the volume control got enumerated automatically to the proper audio output. AND, this only happened when installing to an sdcard, and running for the first time there. Did not happen to an initial usb install.

Subsequent sdcard reboots were fine and sound channel detected normally. This pointed away from Porteus and to the computer itself - having to do with an initial install and um, first-birthday on it.

I guess my point is that I will never file a bug report based upon the very first-birthday boot and kicking the tires. Sort of a "best practices" urban legend thing for me now...