Configuring the audio and updating ALSA for Fedora 13

Bill Giannikos (Home Page)

This guide will help update your version of the ALSA modules under Fedora 13. This is useful for people whose sound is not working with their current version of ALSA.

You should run a full update for your installation of Fedora to ensure you have all the latest packages installed and then restart your machine before continuing on with this guide. 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.

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 better hardware support.

1. Download the latest drivers from http://www.alsa-project.org. In this guide we are going to use alsa-driver-1.0.23 as at the time of writing these were the current stable drivers. As an alternative, you may also decide to download the latest developmental version. 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 type in your root password.

4. Type in the following to install gcc and the kernel headers:

yum -y install gcc kernel-devel kernel-headers make patch

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

cd /usr/src

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

tar -xjvf /path/to/alsa-driver-1.0.23.tar.bz2

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

7. Move into the newly created folder with

cd alsa-driver-1.0.23

8. Run the configuration script with:

./configure

9. Now start the building process with:

make

This will take a while.

10. And finally we install these drivers with:

make install

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

Remember that you may need to adjust your volume settings.

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 above 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.