Configuring Sound

Configuring Hardware - Configuring Sound

Obviously, you'll want to have a computer capable of producing sound. First, you'll want to be sure you've configured the proper driver for your sound card in the kernel. To check which sound card you have,

$ sudo lspci -v | grep Audio

The output should look something like this, depending on your hardware:

00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation Ibex Peak High Definition Audio (rev 06)

If you examine all of the output of lspci -v you should see the details of your audio device. If you've configured the kernel properly, you should see something at the bottom indicating which kernel driver and modules are in use.

Kernel driver in use: HDA Intel

If you don't see this, either you haven't set up your kernel correctly, or you need to load the module for the card. The module for the card above would be snd-hda-intel. I'd probe the module using

$ sudo modprobe hda-snd-intel

After probing the module, you can once again check lspci -v to see if the module and kernel driver are now in use for that hardware. To enable the module at startup, you'll need to add it to the file /etc/modules.autoload.d/kernel-2.6.

Once you are confident you have the correct in-kernel drivers or modules configured and installed, we can emerge the packages we'll need to enable a working audio infrastructure.

$ sudo emerge -av alsa-lib alsa-tools alsa-headers alsa-utils

Once the emerge has completed, we'll want to check our mixer and volume levels using alsamixer.

$ alsamixer