As I proudly (by now, at least) announced on twitter, I’ve installed Linux Mint on my home desktop. I was having some troubles with my old and poorly mantained Mepis, and Mint seemed promising. For the records, I’ll probably never, NEVER use a non-deb based distro on my personal computers. Let’s say I’m religious about this :-)
Well, Mint showed a pretty fancy and straightforward installer, all graphical of course, which reminded me I’m aging: I didn’t freak out because of the small set of choices and configuration options an old Debian-smelling fart like me was used to!
Anyway, it all went fine and I was pretty much impressed about how simple it was to install those evil proprietary NVidia drivers that let me suffer so many times in the past: I was prompted to install it and in a 2-click worth wizard, and an Xorg restart, and it was all done. Cool! I was so exited about it that I froze when I discovered that the audio was not working!!
For the impatients, this is the fix that worked for me:
# last line in /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf
options snd-hda-intel model=3stack-6ch-dig
Here follows the full, tedious story :-)
I’ve had to look here and there to figure out how to convince the alsa driver to push those audio bits through the integrated adio card of my Asus P5K motherboard. It was not hard to understand that modprobe had to be properly configured in order to initialize the snd_hda_intel module with the correct card model, for which I had to choose one as listed in /usr/share/doc/alsa-base/driver/ALSA-Configuration.txt.gz that would have best suited my hw. These were the choices:
ALC883/888
3stack-dig 3-jack with SPDIF I/O
6stack-dig 6-jack digital with SPDIF I/O
3stack-6ch 3-jack 6-channel
3stack-6ch-dig 3-jack 6-channel with SPDIF I/O
6stack-dig-demo 6-jack digital for Intel demo board
acer Acer laptops (Travelmate 3012WTMi, Aspire 5600, etc)
acer-aspire Acer Aspire 9810
medion Medion Laptops
medion-md2 Medion MD2
targa-dig Targa/MSI
targa-2ch-dig Targs/MSI with 2-channel
laptop-eapd 3-jack with SPDIF I/O and EAPD (Clevo M540JE, M550JE)
lenovo-101e Lenovo 101E
lenovo-nb0763 Lenovo NB0763
lenovo-ms7195-dig Lenovo MS7195
lenovo-sky Lenovo Sky
haier-w66 Haier W66
3stack-hp HP machines with 3stack (Lucknow, Samba boards)
6stack-dell Dell machines with 6stack (Inspiron 530)
mitac Mitac 8252D
clevo-m720 Clevo M720 laptop series
fujitsu-pi2515 Fujitsu AMILO Pi2515
3stack-6ch-intel Intel DG33* boards
auto auto-config reading BIOS (default)
I eventually chose the highlighted one, even if I’m not completely fine with it since my card actually supports 8 channels. But whatever, it worked! And that’s the important thing.
I didn’t found any specific information for this specific motherboard, so I thought it might be of some help for others.
Hope this helps!