Saturday, February 2, 2013

Ubuntu on Chromebook - How to get the speakers working

If you are having difficulty getting the speakers working with Ubuntu installed follow these steps

Out of the box the sound sources are 'muted' so it is just a matter of unmuting them. Here is what I did in detail (pay attention to matching Left with Left and Right with Right, otherwise you might end up with swapped channels).

1. Open a Terminal (ctrl-alt-T) type 'alsamixer' and hit enter


2. Top left of the terminal make sure that '[Playback]' is highlighted in yellow, either hit the 'Tab' key to cycle through, or 'F3' (refresh button) to select it.


3. Press the 'm' key which will toggle un-muting/muting for that specific Item. There are many options in alsamixer so you have to read carefully for the correct items listed in items 4 and 5. 

4. Left Speaker Mixer Left DAC1

5. Right Speaker Mixer Right DAC1


6. After you've enabled all these channels you should test them.


7. Use ALT-Q to exit out of AlsaMixer