Dolby Surround Sound

UPDATE 10/22/10: I wrote this article TWO YEARS ago. A lot of things have changed since then. This post is horribly out of date, anything in this post probably doesn’t work anymore, and I can no longer help you with getting your surround sound to work. I stopped using Ubuntu more than a year ago, and I no longer keep up with how Ubuntu does things. I am really sorry, but I cannot answer your questions. Check the Ubuntu forums for more up to date information.

Got the Dolby Surround Sound working. A big thanks to the people over at the Ubuntu forums, especially wyth. I followed his instructions, but with a few modifications, so I will repost what I did. If you have any questions, feel free to comment. WordPress has a bad habit of changing my formating of the code, like putting curly quotes instead of straight and making a double dash into a long dash. So yeah.

Open a terminal. You will need to install the following:

sudo aptitude install build-essential libncurses-dev gettext \
libasound2 xmlto xmltoman linux-headers-`uname -r`

Next get the latest ALSA drivers. Make sure you don’t get a release candidate, it will have rc in the name. The release candidate for alsa-utils did not make properly for me. For example, get alsa-utils-1.0.18.tar.bz2, not alsa-utils-1.0.18rc3.tar.bz2.

• alsa-driver
• alsa-lib
• alsa-utils

These were downloaded to my desktop. It may be different for you. You need to know where these files were downloaded, because we will be moving them in the next step.

Now create a folder for these files. I created it in my home folder, so ~/src/alsa. If you do it like this, instead of the way wyth did it, then you will not have to use sudo except to make install. Make sure when you copy the files (cp) that you don’t forget that space and period “.” at the end of that line. I did.

mkdir -p ~/src/alsa
cd ~/src/alsa
cp ~/Desktop/alsa* .
tar xjf alsa-driver*.bz2
tar xjf alsa-lib*.tar.bz2
tar xjf alsa-utils*.tar.bz2

Compile and install alsa-driver. Before “with card options” there is a double dash. Again, wordpress is messing with my formating.

cd alsa-driver* 
./configure --with-card-options=hda-codec-realtek,hda-codec-analog,\
hda-codec-sigmatel,hda-codec-via,hda-codec-atihdmi,\
hda-codec-conexant,hda-codec-cmedia,hda-codec-si3054,hda-generic
make
sudo make install

Compile and install alsa-lib

cd ../alsa-lib* 
./configure 
make 
sudo make install

Compile and install alsa-utils

cd ../alsa-utils* 
./configure 
make 
sudo make install

Next find out what sound card you’re using:

cat /proc/asound/card0/codec#* | grep Codec

I am using the same sound card that wyth is, RealTek ALC888. In the next step, you will be editing the alsa-base file. There are different models that you can assign in the alsa-base file depending on what sound card you are using. I used “lenovo-sky.”

Open the alsa-base file in an editor. gedit is the editor I used, but wyth used nano. You need to check to see which one you have installed, or install one. If you use a different editor, just replace “gedit” with the name of the editor you wish to use.

sudo gedit /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base

Once in the editor, add this line at the very end. Replace “lenovo-sky” if you want to use a different model.

options snd-hda-intel model=lenovo-sky

Restart, and everything should work. If you don’t have alsamixer installed, go to your package manager or terminal and install it. Then you will have to run it and turn on your front speakers and sub woofer. The sub woofer is the LFE channel. If you had a problem with the speakers not turning off when you plugged in head phones, this should fix that also.