Rick's b.log - entry 2025/05/11

Linux Mint getting sound on an Asus E200H in 2025

wget -qO- https://gist.github.com/heikomat/3fe272431b44b580c933bfb901a92257/raw | bash

DO NOT DO THIS!

This fix predates Covid, and tries to install a 5.2 kernel which will be ignored as we're now up to 6.8; plus it tries to configure PulseAudio and, well, we're apparently not using that any more. It's PipeWire and alsa these days.

In an attempt to undo the damage, I removed /usr/share/alsa and that broke pretty much everything to do with sound as nothing could access the alsa.conf file. It seems that the official advice on the internet was "reinstall your system". I think it shows quite a weakness if deleting a non-critical configuration file (no, it's not like I deleted the kernel settings) requires a full reinstall rather than having something able to spit out a shiny new configuration file. After all, something did in the first place, right?

Luckily I didn't delete those files, I just moved them. So I moved them back.

Then I tried to reinstall the audio system, namely:

sudo apt-get install --reinstall alsa-base pulseaudio
sudo alsa force-reload

After a reboot, I heard a weird noise at startup which I presume was supposed to be a "welcome" bing or something. Whatever, it meant that alsa had fiddled around with my machine and managed to set itself up mostly correctly.

Mostly, because after a few minutes of streaming WZBA, sound would die to be replaced by a continual incessant tone (that sounds about D4?) that would only stop if I put the machine to sleep.

The fix for this was:

sudo nano /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf

# Fix continual beep
options snd_sof sof_debug=1

Restart the machine and, well, I've been listening for about half an hour and it seems to be working.

Also, if you find audio glitching regularly and you're reading MP3s from an SD card, before you mess around with anything, copy the MP3 to your system drive and try again. As mentioned last Thursday, I used hdparm to measure the read speed of the µSD card and it managed a pathetic 5.78MB/sec. I don't know if it's crappy hardware, a crappy µSD card, or a crappy driver, but what was happening was the music player (Celluloid) just wasn't able to get data from the µSD card quickly enough. This was ultimately nothing to do with the sound system.

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William Black, 12th May 2025, 18:15

That seems more trouble than it's worth by a long shot.

Rick, 12th May 2025, 19:21

I'm quite pleased that I was able to fix it by myself, but there is something to be said about the value of obsolete/stale data lurking in the various fora...

A tree-dwelling mammal, 13th May 2025, 19:54

Reminds me of the time I'd bought a nice shiny new Creative SB Live sound card. (I needed an SPDIF digital audio output and this was before the days of being able to buy a PCM2704-based USB board off eBay for a fiver.)    I was installing it on a NetBSD machine. It didn't recognise the hardware. Found it during the startup probe but no support in the kernel.    I forget exactly what I did to get it working (this was probably around 2001-02), but it was something along the lines of find the source code in another *BSD (most likely FreeBSD) and port the 'driver' across to NetBSD. Then add a few extra lines into the kernel configuration file. Rebuild the kernel, sacrifice the requisite number of cute fluffy animals, reboot, and hope.    It worked first time. (Actually I think it was second time as the compile failed the first time as I hadn't edited something in the function call, but once the kernel had compiled it worked first time after rebooting.)    Things have improved over the last 20+ years. Now when I need an SPDIF digital output I just plug in one of those aforementioned PCM2704-based boards from eBay for a fiver.

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