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Page Contents Author Introduction Notes Prerequisites Installing the latest 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 Ubuntu 7.10. This is useful for people who's sound is not currently working with their current version of ALSA.

Notes

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 latest ALSA drivers

Before installing the ALSA drivers you will need to decide whether to install the latest stable or development drivers. The stable drivers are more thoroughly tested however the development drivers typically have more hardware support.

Here are the steps to install the ALSA drivers:

1. Download the latest drivers from http://www.alsa-project.org. In this guide we are going to use alsa-driver-1.0.16 as at the time of writing these are the current stable drivers. You should download the development drivers instead of the stable ones if that is the way you would like to go. 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 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.

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.