Linux Advocacy

Recently I decided to install Fedora 8 on my laptop. Originally the laptop came with Ubuntu but the hand holding that distro offers was starting to get in my way and it makes more sense for my job to have a Redhat-based distro on my laptop. The installation was quick and painless but the sound card did not work after applying updates. A lot of Googling turned up a lot of frustrated people. Apparently the Intel ICH8 chipset has some issues with the kernel drivers included with Fedora 8. I ended up having to break one of my cardinal rules of Linux to get sound working but the steps required to get the sound card working aren’t that involved.

To make sound work on a Dell Inspiron 1420N with Fedora 8 installed follow these steps:

1. Make sure you have at least gcc and kernel-devel installed.
2. Download the latest stable source for the drivers from the ALSA Project.
3. Unpack the drivers to your home directory.
4. Run the configure script as follows: ./configure --with-cards=hda-intel
5. Build the drivers with make
6. Install the drivers as root: su -c 'make install'
7. In theory you can drop to run level 1 and reload the modules but I had to reboot.

Sound should now work properly when you log back into your desktop environment. If sound still doesn’t work run alsamixer in a terminal window and make sure the surround channel isn’t muted.

There is also another method that does not require compiling software that can be used for enabling sound on Fedora 8. You can add a third party yum repository with pre-compiled drivers:

1. Install the yum priorities plugin: yum install yum-priorities -y
2. Add the line priority=0 to /etc/yum.repos.d/fedora.repo</code></code>
3. Add the following to a text file named atrpms.repo in /etc/yum.repos.d:

   [atrpms]
   name=Fedora Core $releasever - $basearch - ATrpms
   baseurl=http://dl.atrpms.net/f$releasever-$basearch/atrpms/stable
   gpgkey=http://ATrpms.net/RPM-GPG-KEY.atrpms
   gpgcheck=1
   priority=2
   enabled=1

4. Import the GPG key: rpm --import http://ATrpms.net/RPM-GPG-KEY.atrpms
5. Install the alsa-driver package: yum install alsa-driver -y
6. Reload the alsa modules or reboot

This is somewhat easier and the driver will be updated automatically provided the repository maintainers keep up-to-date with bugfixes for the ALSA project.  The ATrpms project maintains more than just ALSA packages.  There are a good number of multimedia and scientific packages available as well.