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I have recently installed Xubuntu on my Asus C302C Chromebook. Everything works great except I don't have any sound, which seems to be a common problem on Chromebooks. I have read a lot of pages and tried a lot of solutions, but the problem seems to come down to the fact that the laptop is not recognizing the kernel module to load.

Here is a dump of sudo alsa-info from my laptop: https://pastebin.com/gGJ2mXmP

I kept hearing that GalliumOS had great Chromebook support, so I loaded a liveboot image to see if sound worked, and it did! I ran alsa-info there as well to see how it was working: https://pastebin.com/M1KYGkiZ

What stood out to me was that ALSA module loaded was snd_skl_nau88l25_max98357a. When I searched around I found someone else who hit the same problem on an older Kernel and Ubuntu version, and they said you need to compile your own kernel to enable the module.

So I compiled the Kernel and I can see the module available:

$ lsmod | grep nau8825
snd_soc_nau8825        57344  0
snd_soc_core          294912  2 snd_soc_max98357a,snd_soc_nau8825
snd_pcm               131072  4 snd_compress,snd_soc_core,snd_soc_nau8825,snd_pcm_dmaengine

But still no success. How can I force Alsa to use this module?

Update 1:

I noticed that lspci was showing that no kernel driver was being used for the sound card:

$ lspci -nnk |  grep -A3 Audio
00:1f.3 Multimedia audio controller [0401]: Intel Corporation Sunrise Point-LP HD Audio [8086:9d70] (rev 21)
    Kernel modules: snd_hda_intel, snd_soc_skl
00:1f.4 SMBus [0c05]: Intel Corporation Sunrise Point-LP SMBus [8086:9d23] (rev 21)
    Subsystem: Intel Corporation Sunrise Point-LP SMBus [8086:9d23]

But on GalliumOS it is using snd_soc_skl:

$ lspci -nnk | grep -A2 Audio
00:1f.3 Multimedia audio controller [0401]: Intel Corporation Sunrise Point-LP HD Audio [8086:9d70] (rev 21)
    Kernel driver in use: snd_soc_skl
    Kernel modules: snd_hda_intel, snd_soc_skl

Update 2:

I realized that I had snd_soc_skl blacklisted in /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf. I removed it and now lspci shows it being used by my sound card. Still no sound though.

arajek
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3 Answers3

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Since you have already tweaked the default sound settings a lot, I don't know if this answer would still work, but I have verified that it works with fresh installations of Kubuntu 23.04, Ubuntu MATE 23.04, and Manjaro Linux running on a Chromebook with Gemini Lake Processor.

There is a audio-script repository for Chromebooks, which works for Ubuntu 22.10 and later versions.

git clone https://github.com/WeirdTreeThing/chromebook-linux-audio.git
cd chromebook-linux-audio
./setup-audio

And reboot.

Archisman Panigrahi
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Hopefully my experience with the same Chromebook will help. I have managed to get it to work on my Asus 302 with ubuntu 23.04 using audio-scripts repository mentioned above with force-avs-install but I had to use a newer Kernel ( I used mainline 6.3.5 ) as the default ubuntu 23.04 kernel didn't work. Hopefully 23.10 kernels will have everything so won't need changing. Please beware of the damage to speakers warning.

user1704879
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User1704879 solution worked for me however in addition the work/steps he provided I also had to update my coreboot version. You can do that through the MrChromeBox scripts. I also reset the nvram flag as it was locked for some reason. (nvram reset is in the MrChromeBox script)

Jason H
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