How to get sound out of the PC speaker in Debian Etch on the Power Mac G4/466

To get sound to come out of the front speaker — which isn't the default, by they way — on the Power Mac G4 (mine is a 466 MHz) while using Debian Etch, open a terminal.

run alsamixer:

$ alsamixer

Arrow over to PC Speak and type m to unmute the speaker. Use the left and right arrows to navigate and the up and down arrows to adjust the levels of Master, Bass, Treble and PCM as you wish. It helps to have some audio playing while you do this so you can hear the effects of your changes.

When you're done, hit esc to exit alsamixer.

Then, still at a prompt in the terminal, you must save your settings:

$ alsactl store

My settings still weren't saved when I rebooted, so I used su to become root and put the following line in /etc/rc.local:

alsactl restore

Once I modified /etc/rc.local, I could reboot and have the sound coming out of my front speaker without having to go into alsamixer every time.

It's a bit hacky, but whatever works, right?