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Following the answer in Do I need any extra drivers for the Realtek waves maxx audio on my Dell XPS 17?, I'm trying to install audio driver for Dell XPS 15(L502X) from RealTek site. But I'm getting the following errors:

# ./install
.....Decompress Driver source v1.0.2x-5.18
Compile Driver........
./install: 19: ./install: ./configure: not found
make: *** No targets specified and no makefile found.  Stop.
make: *** No rule to make target `install'.  Stop.
./install: 23: ./install: ./snddevices: not found

Whats wrong?

Community
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Ruturaj Patil
  • 121
  • Just a question out of curiosity, why you are trying to install audio driver? It works out of the box, I am using it. – Web-E Nov 16 '13 at 12:17
  • For the same reason in the post I followed. Sound has very poor quality on Ubuntu compared to that on Windows. And I'm assuming using these drivers will improve it – Ruturaj Patil Nov 16 '13 at 12:37
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    Linux is NOT windows: "In case of doubt, change driver" may work in windows but is bad advice in Linux. But if you want to continue, make sure you have installed the complete tool-chain of gcc, kernel-headers etc. because you will be compiling from source. – thom Nov 16 '13 at 13:17
  • Seems that you indeed need to install new drivers: do you have build-essential installed ? – thom Nov 17 '13 at 13:43
  • I've downloaded the packet myself...I think I have the answer. – thom Nov 17 '13 at 14:19

2 Answers2

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What is wrong is that the install script has a very small bug in it which is very easy to correct.

If you run it, it will indeed display errors.

What to do ?

  1. open the install script in an editor
  2. change line 1 from #!/bin/sh to #!/bin/bash (just to be shure)
  3. change line 18 from cd alsa-driver-RTv5.18 to cd alsa-driver-RTv5.18/alsa

Save it and run sudo ./install

thom
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First check if you don't overload any parts in the mixing path by setting everything at 75% and check if the "bad-sound" problem is solved.

If not: read on.

One of the underestimated problems in Linux sound is samplerateconversion.

Let's say that you try to play a file with samplerate 48000, this will be converted by pulseaudio to 44100 and will be converted by ALSA to 48000 again because your sounddevice can't do 44100.

The pulseaudio samplerateconversion is OK, but the samplerateconversion of ALSA is of bad sound quality.

So best thing you can do is to set the output of pulseaudio to 48000 so that ALSA won't use samplerateconversion.

Edit the pulseaudio config: /etc/pulse/client.conf
change this:

; default-sample-format = s16le 
; default-sample-rate = 44100
; default-sample-channels = 2
; default-channel-map = front-left,front-right

to this:

; default-sample-format = s16le 
default-sample-rate = 48000
; default-sample-channels = 2
; default-channel-map = front-left,front-right

If all else fails, use OSS4 instead of ALSA+Pulseaudio. ( The soundquality of OSS4 is extremely good but expect some inconveniences)

thom
  • 7,542
  • Thanks for response; But please elaborate : "First check if you don't overload any parts in the mixing path by setting everything at 75%" . Not sure what you mean. Do you mean music player sound level and speaker sound level should be 75% ? Also please suggest link for installing OSS4 – Ruturaj Patil Nov 16 '13 at 14:40
  • And one more thing, Windows supports playback of 24bit audio with upto 192k sample rate. Can this be done on Ubuntu ? – Ruturaj Patil Nov 16 '13 at 14:42
  • try it...if it doesn't: file a bug. – thom Nov 16 '13 at 14:58
  • Yes, musicplayer soundlevel at 75% or less and speaker soundlevel at 75% or less. The sourcecode of OSS4 for ubuntu is here: https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/oss4 – thom Nov 16 '13 at 17:47
  • I tried installing OSS4 without success. It ended up with Dummy Output and no sound. So I reverted to alsa. But worth a shot – Ruturaj Patil Nov 17 '13 at 06:32