Lubuntu - Cannot find soundcard in chromebook

Question

noob here - I recently put Lubuntu on a lenovo 100e gen 2 chromebook and the only issue is that it cannot identify the soundcard. Does anyone know what might be a solution?

I've tried reinstalling alsa tools and pulse audio, and rebooting of course, but that isn't the issue. If I run alsamixer the readout is:

ALSA lib conf.c:5178:(_snd_config_evaluate) function snd_func_card_inum returned error: No such file or directory
ALSA lib confmisc.c:422:(snd_func_concat) error evaluating strings
ALSA lib conf.c:5178:(_snd_config_evaluate) function snd_func_concat returned error: No such file or directory
ALSA lib confmisc.c:1334:(snd_func_refer) error evaluating name
ALSA lib conf.c:5178:(_snd_config_evaluate) function snd_func_refer returned error: No such file or directory
ALSA lib conf.c:5701:(snd_config_expand) Evaluate error: No such file or directory
ALSA lib control.c:1528:(snd_ctl_open_noupdate) Invalid CTL default
cannot open mixer: No such file or directory

this is a current Lubuntu 22.04.3 LTS/Jammy Jelly distro. Obviously there's something about a library not existing, but I've re-installed alsa multiple times and that just isn't fixing it.

EDIT: I did try the code from the suggested link, that did not work. I.e., running:

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

resulted in no sound, and the following output:

Cloning into 'chromebook-linux-audio'...
remote: Enumerating objects: 287, done.
remote: Counting objects: 100% (67/67), done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (47/47), done.
remote: Total 287 (delta 34), reused 46 (delta 20), pack-reused 220
Receiving objects: 100% (287/287), 289.43 KiB | 2.28 MiB/s, done.
Resolving deltas: 100% (154/154), done.
bash: cd: audio-scripts: No such file or directory
bash: ./setup-audio: No such file or directory

Additionally, running

sudo lshw -C sound

appears to identify the "soundcard"/multimedia piece, but I don't truly know what some of the output means. That outputs:

  *-multimedia              
       description: Multimedia audio controller
       product: Celeron N3350/Pentium N4200/Atom E3900 Series Audio Cluster
       vendor: Intel Corporation
       physical id: e
       bus info: pci@0000:00:0e.0
       version: 0b
       width: 64 bits
       clock: 33MHz
       capabilities: pm msi pciexpress bus_master cap_list
       configuration: driver=snd_soc_skl latency=0
       resources: irq:25 memory:91210000-91213fff memory:91000000-910fffff

Update: After pointing to the updated directory, the following was output, but with no change and no recognition of output devices by PulseAudio:

Using sof
Installing SOF
Installing SOF firmware
Installing modprobe config
Installing UCM configuration
Cloning into '/tmp/chromebook-ucm-conf'...
remote: Enumerating objects: 864, done.
remote: Counting objects: 100% (385/385), done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (239/239), done.
remote: Total 864 (delta 187), reused 305 (delta 122), pack-reused 479
Receiving objects: 100% (864/864), 158.26 KiB | 1.32 MiB/s, done.
Resolving deltas: 100% (413/413), done.
Updating libasound2 (this may take some time)
WARNING: apt does not have a stable CLI interface. Use with caution in scripts.
Audio installed successfully! Reboot to finish setup.

I'm not sure at this point what is wrong - everything says it should work. I attempted both SOF and AVS versions of drivers, with both saying they successfully worked and neither accomplishing anything - but as AVS is unstable it did cause problems with GRUB and PulseAudio for my setup.

Am I missing something basic? I did try to restart PulseAudio and that did not help. Running alsamixer also shows the same output as before.

Nowadays there is a standard method for installing audio drivers for Chromebooks. See Ubuntu Chromebook Audio Drivers. Your chromebook (codename PHASER) is supported — Archisman Panigrahi, Oct 27 '23 at 00:06
In case the other answer (the link I posted above) does not work, please let us know. — Archisman Panigrahi, Oct 27 '23 at 00:10
Thanks for the responses - I hope it's okay if I just update the question so I can better show output. This isn't my first Linux machine, but it's my first time actually trying to USE Linux on a machine — jheller, Oct 28 '23 at 13:51
Please open an issue at https://github.com/WeirdTreeThing/chromebook-linux-audio/issues. There, post the details about the output message of the script, and the details of the problems. — Archisman Panigrahi, Oct 30 '23 at 20:25
Does Lubuntu still not recognize the speakers after installing the SOF drivers? — Archisman Panigrahi, Oct 30 '23 at 20:27
Lubuntu doesn't appear to recognize the speakers as far as I can tell. — jheller, Nov 05 '23 at 16:32

Archisman Panigrahi · Answer 1 · 2023-10-28T14:53:19.357

0

The name if the audio script directory chanced.

cd chromebook-linux-audio
./setup-audio

Then reboot.

edited Oct 28 '23 at 14:53

answered Oct 28 '23 at 14:16

Archisman Panigrahi

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Thank you for that critical information - however that didn't work in my case for some reason. It did seem to work in the terminal, but then on reboot there simply wasn't any difference with the SOF version and the AVS version messed with my GRUB apparently... So I scrambled to switch back to SOF. I will put edits in the question to update it. – jheller Oct 30 '23 at 01:27

Lubuntu - Cannot find soundcard in chromebook

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