Enabling Audio in Debian on the Mini 9

Something you'll probably notice if you're running Debian, and possibly the full version of Ubuntu, on your Mini 9 is that, out of the box, audio will not play out of the speakers. This is not a very difficult problem to solve, but does require creating a config file to tell the system how to load the sound module.

We will want to create a file with the following lines:

alias snd-card-0 snd-hda-intel
options snd-hda-intel index=0 model=dell

The file we want to create is /etc/modprobe.d/sound. In order to create this file, you'll want to open this file in your favourite text editor, or use the echo command:

# vim /etc/modprobe.d/sound

Or:

# gedit /etc/modprobe.d/sound

Or:

# echo "alias snd-card-0 snd-hda-intel" > /etc/modprobe.d/sound
# echo "options snd-hda-intel index=0 model=dell" >> /etc/modprobe.d/sound

Now that we've created this file, we need to reload the snd_hda_intel module:

# rmmod snd_hda_intel
# modprobe snd_hda_intel

The first command above may return a message saying that the snd_hda_intel module is in use. If you get this message, you can either reboot or force the system to unload the module with the following:

# rmmod -f snd_hda_intel
# modprobe snd_hda_intel

Now that we've got the module loaded correctly, we need to turn up the volume on the Mini 9 speakers. If you haven't removed the volume control applet from your panel, you can just double click on that to bring up the volume control window. Alternatively, you can run the following command to bring up the terminal volume control application:

$ alsamixer

GUI Interface:

Terminal Interface:

You'll want to adjust the volume on the "Speaker" control indicated in the screen shots above. After doing that, your audio should be working correctly on your Mini 9

Next time we'll install flash and java support in the Mozilla/Firefox/Iceweasel web browser