Economy Size Geek

Ok the Mac OS X/Windows users out there will have no sympathy or understanding of that statement - but hey that’s why I run Linux right. I like figuring stuff. I like figuring stuff out so much that not only do I run Debian - but I run Debian unstable.

So several months ago I got a snazzy new laptop - it’s an HP Pavilion zv5000. It replaced my ageing Dell. Overall this thing has been a huge improvement over my old laptop -with two minor acceptions:

1. The dock is annoying - it donesn’t have a dedicated network mac id - so I have to resort to other trickery to detect I’m in a dock and they put a huge speaker on it that blocks the disk light :(
2. I have no sound.

Ok the second one is probably more my fault that anything. Basically I’ve been trying to use the Alsa sound system. Until today if I wanted sound under Linux I had to:

1. Become Root
2. Run alsaconfig
3. Fix the volume setting
4. Chmod a bunch of devices so I can control volume as a normal user
5. run my apps

I had to do the above every time I rebooted. That was so annoying I usually just let my office mate blast his stereo.

I had enough today - since I was playing with an application that played audio as part of it’s demo.

I found out that a big part of my problem is that when I went to 2.6 kernel I never setup a modprobe.conf which means a lot of my modules weren’t loading properly. Forunately there’s a program for this called generate-modprobe.conf. Which I had but it was stored as documentation not as an executable. I ran it - and after a little while I managed to get it to run the sound modules and the nVidia driver in dual head mode - one issue left.

I added a new catch-all script called Startup.sh which will handle all the startup stuff - like chmod’ing devices for my normal account

I run Gnome. It comes with a little widget to handle volume control. This is sort of important because I need to be able to easily mute the sound when I get a call. The widget totally didn’t work. I was left controlling volume from an ncurses alsa-mixer - which I can tell you sucks.

I found a nice reference on a sight in Hong Kong. Some parts were in Chinese and parts were in English. In the thread I found instructions to add:

ii alsa-base 1.0.8-6 ALSA driver configuration files
ii alsa-utils 1.0.8-3 ALSA utilities
ii gamix 1.99.p14.debia Graphical sound mixer for ALSA
ii libasound2 1.0.8-2 ALSA library
ii libasound2-dev 1.0.8-2 ALSA library development files
ii libesd-alsa0 0.2.35-2 Enlightened Sound Daemon (ALSA) - Shared lib

I did that and viola - the widget works!

Ok so that may seem like a lot of work - and even possible a pain. And it is - but now that it works I’m done - and I feel like I learned something :)