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Page Contents Author Introduction Notes Prerequisites Installing the ALSA drivers

Author

Bill Giannikos (bill2 at giannikos.com.au)
www.billgiannikos.com

Introduction

This guide will help update your version of the ALSA drivers under Debian 4.0. This is useful for people who's sound is not currently working with their current version of ALSA. We will be covering the installation of the the latest stable drivers, the latest development and the CVS ALSA drivers.

Notes

We will be using 'nano' as our text editor of choice but you can use whatever you wish.

While this guide is mainly focused to laptop users there isn't any difference for desktop users.

Prerequisites

You should run a full update for your installation of Ubuntu to ensure you have all the latest packages installed.

Installing the ALSA drivers

Depending on your sound controller you will need to make the decision on which version of ALSA you will need to install. If you are not sure you should start with the stable drivers. If the stable drivers don't work you can then move on to the development driver and then if necessary move on to the CVS driver.

The stable drivers have received the most testing and are the recommended drivers to use if they support your sound controller. The development drivers haven't been tested as much as the stable ones have but still typically work well. The CVS drivers are up to date drivers with the latest developments however this means that this version have barely been tested so should only be used if absolutely necessary.

Here are the steps to installing the ALSA drivers:
1. Download your chosen set of drivers from http://www.alsa-project.org for the stable and development drivers and from http://ftp.suse.com/pub/projects/alsa/snapshot/driver/ for the latest CVS drivers. In this guide we are going to use alsa-driver-1.0.15 as at the time of writing these are the latest stable drivers. You just need to substitute your driver version with the version used here. You only need to download the alsa-driver package, the other packages (alsa-lib, alsa-utils etc.) are not necessary.
2. Load up a terminal window if you are in the graphic interface.
3. Type in the following commands to install gcc and the kernel headers:

4. Move to the /usr/src/ folder with:

5. Extract the contents of the file you downloaded with:

Remember to replace the "/path/to" in this command to the path of where your file is.

6. Move into the newly created folder with

7. Run the configuration script with:

8. Now start the building process with:

This will take a while.

9. And finally we install these drivers with:

10. Reboot your computer and the newer ALSA drivers will be used.

Remember that you may need to adjust your volume settings.