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Page Contents Author Introduction Notes Prerequisites Installing the latest stable ALSA drivers Installing the latest development ALSA drivers Installing the CVS 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 Fedora 8. This is useful for people who's sound is not currently working with their current version of ALSA. We will be covering the easiest method first which is installing the latest stable drivers and then later we will discuss updating to the development and 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 Fedora to ensure you have all the latest packages installed. Unlike most other Linux distribution, Fedora update their distribution to newer versions of the kernel as they are released. It is possible that by just updating your Fedora installation that sound will begin to work.

Installing the latest stable ALSA drivers

For an easy install we will be using the ATrpms repository.

1. Load up a terminal window if you are in the graphic interface.
2. Switch to the root user by entering the command "su -" (without the quotes) and typing in your root password
3. Edit the file /etc/yum.conf. Using nano we type the command:

4. If you have already configured yum to use the ATrpms repository then append "*alsa*" to the end of the "includepkgs" line and skip the next 3 steps. Otherwise continue on.
5. Add the following to the bottom of this file:

6. Save the file. In nano you press Ctrl-X, answer yes to the "Save modified buffer" question and then press enter on the file name to write.
7. If you have not previously setup ATrpms execute the following command:

8. Now execute the following command:

9. Reboot your system and you will be using the updated ALSA driver.

Remember that you may need to adjust your volume settings.

Installing the latest development ALSA drivers

If the stable ALSA drivers aren't new enough to support your sound card then you may need to install the development drivers. It should be noted that these drivers have not been fully tested and so may cause some unexpected issues. You should only install these if the stable drivers do not work for you.

1. Download the latest development drivers from http://www.alsa-project.org. In this guide we are going to use alsa-driver-1.0.16rc2 as at the time of writing these are the current ones. 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. Switch to the root user by entering the command "su -" (without the quotes) and typing in your root password
4. Type in the following to install gcc and the kernel headers:

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

6. 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.
7. Move into the newly created folder with

8. Run the configuration script with:

9. Now start the building process with:

This will take a while.
10. And finally we install these drivers with:

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

Remember that you may need to adjust your volume settings.

Installing the CVS ALSA drivers

The CVS drivers are right up to date with the latest developments. However these have barely been testing so should only be used if absolutely necessary.

The steps to installing these drivers are exactly the same as those for the development version except for the file you need to download. You can download these drivers from http://ftp.suse.com/pub/projects/alsa/snapshot/driver/. Grab the latest version. Then just follow the instruction above by substituting the development version with the CVS version.