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

| | Comments (0) |

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?

Leave a comment

Tech Talk column

Steven Rosenberg's weekly Tech Talk column, which appears Saturdays in the Los Angeles Daily News, is now available on the Daily News Technology page.

About this blog

Comments are back: Comments have returned to Click, but due to the thousands of spam comments clogging up the system each day, commenters must now log in. To comment, either create a Movable Type account when prompted, or create and use a Typekey account. Movable Type, as configured on this blog, allows commenters to create a Movable Type account, verify it via e-mail and then sign in to comment. Other methods of verification are OpenID, Live Journal and Vox.




Steven Rosenberg aims to learn what he does not know. He writes about it here.



About this Entry

This page contains a single entry by Steven Rosenberg published on September 13, 2008 3:00 AM.

Double-tapping in Debian Lenny was the previous entry in this blog.

Back in the Ubuntu saddle again is the next entry in this blog.

Find recent content on the main index or look in the archives to find all content.

Recent Comments

Powered by Movable Type 4.21-en

Advertisement

Other blogs

Day 30: 30 baseball books in 30 days of April, '09: Let's keep this thing going in Farther Off the Wall
The Sol's Mother's Day Incentive in 100 Percent Soccer
Morning Buzz in Inside USC with Scott Wolf
Slow car sales take a toll in The Sausage Factory
TRACK AND FIELD: Big day for Saugus seniors in Daily News High School Spotlight