EOL Chromebooks (and others) have no sound OOTB

Support & Help Requests Hardware
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#1

Hello my fellow Ubuntu Mate enthusiasts!

First of all, I love Ubuntu Mate, and I run 18.04 on almost every machine myself and my family own very happily.

I've been trying out the 20.04 dailies too and am really looking forward to the LTS release.

I just wanted to flag that a lot of Chromebooks (and presumably other laptops with the same chipsets) that are now end of life have no sound OOTB, even on the latest 20.04 daily as of today.

It's actually an upstream bug:

Whilst you can use the git repo, it's hit and miss. It would be great to get this ironed out before the final release of 20.04 LTS as there are a lot of EOL Chromebooks that could be flashed with the MrChromebox EFI firmware and given a new lease of life with Ubuntu Mate (or indeed any other distros if the upstream bug is fixed).

For example, I have an Asus C200 here that was EOL on ChromeOS last summer, and has a chtmax98090 chip that has no sound OOTB, and would be happy to use it for testing.

Any thoughts @Wimpy?

#2

Same here. I have ubuntu mate running on 3 systems at home. But need to have gallium os on the chromebook as the sound on the chromebook doesn't work with Ubuntu and the derivatives. Wish this gets fixed to work out of the box for 20.04

#3

I've added a crashlog to the launchpad bug, as it appears that trying to apply the UCM config for chtmax98090 from https://github.com/plbossart/UCM.git leads to Pulseaudio crashing on 20.04.

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#4

Still no sound in 20.10 out of the box.
This launchpad bug deals with the issue and gives two workarounds.

  • Copying ucm2 files from github in /usr/share/alsa/ucm2/ (did nothing in my case).
  • Installing the alsa-ucm-conf 1.2.3-1 package solved the issue (for me) with sound working after a reboot.
    20.10 comes with alsa-ucm-conf 1.2.2.2.

It will obviously be fixed in 21.04 :slight_smile:
Hope this helps.

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#5

Thanks @Utsuro! I have limited access to these machines as they are now with other family members, but I will test this out when I get the chance.

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