How to Set Default Sound Card on Debian/GNU Linux for a Lenovo x240
I recently decided to downgrade from a giant workstation laptop (Lenovo W520) to a Lenovo X240 purely for mobility reasons. I ran Ubuntu 14.04 LTS for a while but as always I run into the same issue. The unity interface freezes everyonce in a while and it drives me truly insane when it happens. I then install XFCE on Ubuntu and I always run into some serious errors. Presumably something to do with unity and XFCE battling it out. I’m far to lazy to chase it down, so I end up installing Debian every time.
Anyway I’ve discovered that there’s two sound cards for the X240 and Debian Sid seems to believe that I should be using the HDMI output from the display port as the default card, which is completely incorrect.
I found after installing Debian that my multimedia buttons for sound
didn’t work. I was too lazy to figure it out. Later when I install
Pithos it wouldn’t playback any sound and presented a GStreamer error.
I found the problem was the default sound card.
Let’s fix it here’s the two sound cards:
➜ ~ lspci -nn | grep -i audio 00:03.0 Audio device [0403]: Intel Corporation Haswell-ULT HD Audio Controller [8086:0a0c] (rev 0b)00:1b.0 Audio device [0403]: Intel Corporation 8 Series HD Audio Controller [8086:9c20] (rev 04)
Now we’re going to manually set the load order via modprobe:
# As root
touch /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf
vim /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf
Now add this and save it:
# Regular Sound Cardoptions snd_hda_intel index=0 model=auto vid=8086 pid=9c20# Minidisplay Portoptions snd_hda_intel index=1 model=auto vid=8086 pid=0c0c
Now you can attempt to reload the alsa modules and audio services.
Personally I find Linux audio services to be rather difficult to work
with. I’d suggest restarting, it’s just simpler.