I'm getting a new laptop for Christmas this year. Well, I say for Christmas, but I've actually already got it, and today I started using it (my Final Year Project was refusing to compile on my old one. No idea why, but it just wouldn't have it!).
So I installed Debian (as I was always going to), and off it goes. All happy, a couple of tweaks to the grub boot command to get the touchpad working, and I'm sorted. Or so I thought.
I was happily sitting at Uni, listening to my music, when I realise that the sound is not only coming through my headphones, but also out of the inbuilt speakers. Thinking that odd, I fiddle around with the headphone jack in case it's a loose connection or something.
No ball.
After a quick google, I realise that this is a common problem with the sound chip I have (I'll have to update this post with the name of it if I remember!). It seems that the speaker cut-out is handled by the driver rather than by the hardware (who knew!).
So, I add squeeze-backports to my apt-sources and upgrade to Kernel 2.6.38 hoping that the ALSA driver in that will have it.
Again, no ball.
Deciding to just see if it'll work (although there's nothing more permanent than a temporary solution) if I upgrade to Kernel 3.0, I grab the associated packages from the wheezy repository. After a bit of faffing with dependencies (and about 10 package downloads, one after the other), I get Kernel 3.0 installed. Which is all well and good, but it refuses to install the nVidia driver I spent oh-so-long installing earlier. Kernel 3.0 is compiled with gcc-4.6 which doesn't appear in squeeze, and as I don't really want to upgrade large swathes of my fresh squeeze install, I refuse to let it install. Still, at least the alsa is now working and it mutes the speakers when I plug headphones in!
Eventually, I debootstrap-ed a chroot of wheezy, and compiled the nVidia dkms module in there, copied it out, and ran depmod. It worked perfectly, and now I have a nice running 3.0 kernel, with full ALSA support for my sound card, and an nVidia binary driver for the display (I would use one of the open source ones, but my video card, a GeForce 410M appears to be a bit new!).
