Linux and Electronics

Last month my onboard sound card start being crazy, it work random after each shutdown. When I want to watch movies, I have to switch off my computer and turn on by hoping the onboard sound card work again. At first, I’m think this should be the drivers issues and my onboard sound card symptom do appear on this site. So I download the latest ALSA driver and I compile, but this can’t help.

Finally I can’t stand it anymore and bought Creative SB X-Fi Extreme Audio sound card to replace it. The old ALSA driver come with Ubuntu wouldn’t work with this card. I have to use the latest ALSA driver, you can download the driver from here. These are summary of this guide to compile and install the ALSA driver:

> tar jxf alsa-driver-xxx
> tar -xf alsa-driver-xxx
> cd alsa-driver-xxx
> ./configure --with-cards=ca0106 --with-sequencer=yes; make;
> sudo make install

Now restart your computer and the sound card should be working. If you need get the 5.1 surround work, you can edit your .asoundrc using editor you prefer(for original guide go here) :

	> vim .asoundrc

and add this in:

	pcm.!default {
	   type plug
	   slave.pcm "surround51"
	   slave.channels 6
	   route_policy duplicate
	}

Reference:

1. Ubuntu HDA Intel HOWTO
2. ALSA Module - CA0106
3. Surround Sound in Linux
   
4. The Simple Way to Get 5.1 Surround Sound Audio Working in Ubuntu

This entry was posted on Friday, March 7th, 2008 at 11:07 pm and is filed under ALSA, Linux. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.