How to upgrade ALSA – The Easy Way

I got recently pissed off by a major defect occurred to my system. All of a sudden the headphones just stopped working. Actually their behaviour is quite weird: once I plug the headphones the sound is fed for about one sec and then it just die. This is one of those bugs which make you willing to swear as they affect one basic feature you may or may not want to part from.

I already tried to follow some advices dug out from some forums and went rotten (lame of me I admit it). I basically tried to remove all ALSA packages to reinstall them from scratch, and this caused a system crash and, God knows why, the X user settings to be wiped off.

After reinstalling Ubuntu Intrepid I tried another approach to simply upgrade ALSA in the hope of solving my problem. Well, this hasn’t but maybe you can find anyway interesting this simple method to upgrade ALSA to the latest version.

This Soundcheck guy made a script to easily retrive and install the latest ALSA driver. The script and discussion are located in this thread on Ununtu forums but I will report the instructions here for convenience.

First, let’s introduce ALSA by reading a brief description directly from the website of the project.

The Advanced Linux Sound Architecture (ALSA) provides audio and MIDI functionality to the Linux operating system. ALSA has the following significant features:

* Efficient support for all types of audio interfaces, from consumer sound cards to professional multichannel audio interfaces.
* Fully modularized sound drivers.
* SMP and thread-safe design.
* User space library (alsa-lib) to simplify application programming and provide higher level functionality.
* Support for the older Open Sound System (OSS) API, providing binary compatibility for most OSS programs.

Now let’s go on with the instruction to upgrade the driver to the latest version.

Important Note: please before updating ALSA consider the reason you’re doing it it’s important, make a beckup of your files (you never know) and read carefully the thread I mentioned above. The script author says that he wrote it to be as fail safe as possible but given that it will affect low level packages please be sure you know you’re doing it at your own risk.

1. First you must download the script which can be found somewhere at the bottom of the thread or here. Note that you must register to Ubuntu forums to download the script.
2. Save the script in your /home or wherever you like and untar it either with File Roller or Ark, or with tar xvf AlsaUpgrade-1.0.x-rev-1.16.tar from a terminal
3. If you haven’t done yet, open a terminal and move to the script location with cd [download directory]
4. Type sudo ./AlsaUpgrade-1.0.x-rev-1.16.sh
5. On the first run the script will present all the options you can select when running it for actually doing its job.
6. To download, compile and install the packages on a single pass type sudo ./AlsaUpgrade-1.0.x-rev-1.16.sh -di Note: -di is the option to do so but there are many more to suit your needs
7. Wait for a fifteen minutes and then reboot
8. Have fun with your freshly updated ALSA driver