After making provisions on another system for my responsibilities to others, I have studied again the possibilities of moving my laptop back to a pure console Linux installation. I waded through some discussions over FreeBSD, NetBSD, Gentoo, and a few others I would never consider. I slap myself for not thinking of it before, but I found Squeeze had much of what I thought I was hunting.
What I was hunting was something which would support easy compilation of Apline 2.0 with my personal tweaks, keep the full mousing capabilities on the console, and allow me to setup sound without having to install a bunch of X dependencies. Squeeze passed those tests.
After burning the netinstaller image, I had several failures, either because the ISO image was borked, the burn was borked, or the installer had errors. At any rate, I gave up and tried the install-upgrade method via Lenny. With minimal installation in place — minus X — I changed my sources.lst to read “squeeze” in place of the references to “lenny.” Then the usual apt-get update followed by apt-get dist-upgrade. This worked well enough.
The only trouble I ran into was the sound configuration. Turns out there’s a bug in the files which come in the alsa-utils package. Since the old alsaconf is gone, one runs alsactl init and waits for a response indicating it figured out what card you have. However, I was getting errors about the default file on line 52. Digging around a bit on Google produced a bug fix from the Fedora Community. Open /usr/share/alsa/init/default and change a couple of things:
Line 49:
CTL{name}="Headphone Playback Volume",PROGRAM=="__ctl_search",GOTO="headphone0_end"becomes
CTL{name}="Headphone Playback Volume",PROGRAM!="__ctl_search",GOTO="headphone0_end"(replacing the equal sign after “PROGRAM” with an exclamation mark) and
CTL{name}="Synth Playback Volume",,PROGRAM=="__ctl_search", \becomes
CTL{name}="Synth Playback Volume",PROGRAM=="__ctl_search", \(removing the double comma near the middle)
Then it was:
/etc/init.d/alsa-utils restart
and we have sound. That gave me the confidence to pull in mplayer-nogui from Debian Multimedia’s repository. The only thing puzzling me is why I have to have font stuff for a console app, but I let it pass and installed it all.
Testing an MP3 file with Mplayer on the command line worked very nicely. So we are off and running again.
Pingback: Life on the Console: Debian Squeeze « Just Passing Through
Thank you!
This worked for me. But I had to execute “alsactl init” after editing the file and restarting alsa-utils.
I don’t remember now, but I may have done that, too. Thanks.