After upgrading to Lenny, everything was really smooth and in order. The only package that didn’t upgrade automatically was Quanta. So from the command line, I did a quick install of Quanta and good to go. Well, sort of. After the upgrade, I rebooted to find that my sound was broken. Up in the top right of the screen, when I clicked on the Gnome Mixer Volume Control icon (which had a diabolical red x on it), I got this error message:

The volume control did not find any elements and/or devices to control. This means either that you don’t have the right GStreamer plugins installed, or that you don’t have a sound card configured.

After some research, I found that the new kernel did not have built in support for Alsa sound firmware! What?! Ok, I’m not going to rant about this too much, suffice it to say, it worked with the previous kernel why in the world would they not include it in the most recent kernel? Rant over. Let’s fix it.

First thing, you have to do a manual install of the alsa-source and the build-essential files. Open terminal in super user mode, I just used the icon already on Debian, under Applications | System Tools | Terminal Server – Super User Mode and enter the following at the command prompt:

aptitude install alsa-source build-essential

This will take a few minutes, but now you’ll have the groundwork for installing the firmware to connect to your sound card in Debian Lenny. Next, you’ll need to download the firmware for Alsa from here:

ftp://ftp.alsa-project.org/pub/firmware/alsa-firmware-1.0.16.tar.bz2

Make a directory to store this file:

mkdir /usr/src/alsa

At the Terminal command line, copy the downloaded file to the sources area you just created. Adjust this path as needed, depending on where you saved your download (remember Unix is case sensitive):

cp /home/nancyfusco/Desktop/alsa* /usr/src/alsa

Now path out to that area, so you can unpack the tar:

cd /usr/src/alsa

Unpack it:

tar -vxjf alsa-firmware-1.0.16.tar.bz2

Path out to the unpackaged folder:

cd /usr/src/alsa/alsa-firmware-1.0.16

Are you ready? Good! Here we go! Now to compile and install the firmware and configuration for your sound card. At the command prompt enter:

./configure && make && make install

Watch it work while sipping on a cold one. Reboot. Hey! Look! We got sound again! Now go watch some Charlie the Unicorn to celebrate!