Configuring the audio and updating ALSA for Ubuntu 9.04

Bill Giannikos (Home Page)

This guide will help update your version of the ALSA modules under Ubuntu 9.04. This is useful for people whose sound is not currently working with their current version of ALSA.

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

Ubuntu include a set of recently released drivers in an easy to install package. You should try the following before trying to compile the ALSA modules yourself. Please note that at time of writing there are no new ALSA drivers in the backports packages, this section is here for future reference.

1. Load up a terminal window if you are in the graphic interface.

2. Type in the following:

sudo apt-get install linux-backports-modules-jauntry

3. Reboot

That's it for installing newer ALSA modules. If sound still doesn't work, continue reading the rest of this guide.

Before installing the ALSA modules, 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 modules:

1. Download the latest drivers from http://www.alsa-project.org. In this guide we are going to use alsa-driver-1.0.20 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:

sudo apt-get install build-essential linux-headers-`uname -r`

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

cd /usr/src

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

sudo tar -xjvf /path/to/alsa-driver-1.0.20.tar.bz2

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

cd alsa-driver-1.0.20

7. Run the configuration script with:

sudo ./configure

8. Now start the building process with:

sudo make

This will take a while.

9. And finally we install these drivers with:

sudo make install

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

Remember that you may need to adjust your volume settings. Also, if a Ubuntu update installs a new kernel version you will need to go through this process again.

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.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/tiwai/snapshot/. Grab the latest version. Then just follow the instruction above by substituting the development version with the CVS version.

If this guide did not work you may like to view the general Configuring the audio guide or use the Audio Tester.