[Pkg-alsa-devel] Having ALSA work properly at the end of a d-i install?

[Christian Perrier]

Hello dear ALSA package developers (and fellow d-i developers),

As first introdcution, let me mention that I'm quite dumb when
everything comes at sound in Linux, so please forgive in advance my
mistakes or imprecisions...:-)

I'm currently trying to setup a demo box for Debian Installer. The
general principle is a box which installs itself over and over,
cycling around all D-I supported languages.

The install is of course fully automated and is a default "desktop"
install by using the "Desktop environment" task from tasksel.

At the end of the install, a user session is automagically opened and
I intend to get a nice sound saying "Hello and welcome to your new
Debian system"...in the current language. The session is a GNome
session because this is what give all defaults settings.

Here comes my nightmare : though the sound card in my test box is
properly detected (modules are loaded), the sound server in Gnome is
just unable to use it.

(the card is a i810 chipset in a Dell Poweredge SC400..nothing really
strange)

Then comes the alsa packages. I use them for ages on my laptop and
just imagined this was because the installed system didn't have ALSA
installed.

So, I added to my post-install script "apt-get install
alsa-base".

However at that point /etc/init.d/alsa just failed saying no sound
card is found.

I manually tried "alsaconf"...then choose my card....but the result
was the same.

Finally, I figured out that after doing so...just rebooting the
machine gave me some good working sound.

My problem of course is that I don't want to reboot at the end of the
install...I just need to know which magic I have to do.

Do you have some clues for me. I suspect stuff related to hotplug, but
up to now, I failed to find the proper sequence of actions for having
a working ALSA system (and correct settings for the mixer!) at the end
of the install...without rebooting...and with no user interaction.

Please keep me CC'ed to possible answers.

As a conclusion, by the way, I'm afraid to conclude that a freshly
installed sarge box is very likely to have a non-working sound
subsystem. Which of course is quite too bad...:-)

Please keep the crossposting between the two lists as this issue is
quite closely related to d-i topics.


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