PowerMac G5 - Sound - Fixed

Support & Help Requests
,
#1

Hello

congrats to the developers! I have been using elementary OS on my x86 workhorse for the last two years and wanted to give my G5 PPC I have not used much recently a new live. So I tried ubunta Mate 16.04 with a live CD and everything looked well except sound (and WiFi), where no device was listed.

I then carbon copied the existing OS X 10.5.8 installation to a new bigger harddisk, reduced that partition to a smaller size and let the ubuntu MATE installer do the rest as recommended. Everything looked and worked pretty well after installation, but again no sound at all. I am aware that there are quite a few posts in several forums and communities about the sound issue on PPC G5s and that this topic has been marked “Fixed”. But these solutions do not work for me / on my box.

First I had the typical common phenomenon with “dummy audio” being said and no audio device listed in system settings. Alsamixer crashed when selecting
Edit > Sound Card Properties
obviously because there was no sound card recognised.

On wiki.ubuntu.com/PowerPCFAQ it says the file /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.local.conf should be deleted. But I do not have such file on my system. What I found is a blacklist.conf and seven more blacklists in this directory, but none of those seems to adress sound.

Then I added the following to /etc/modules:
snd_aoa_i2sbus
snd_aoa_fabric_layout
snd_aoa_codec_tas
snd_aoa_codec_onyx
As a result there is now a sound card listed in settings:
“K2 KeyLargo Mac/IO”
and both in settings and ALSA the device can be edited. But still no sound what ever the settings are.

btw: in OS X it says the sound card would be:
Texas Instruments TAS3004

pls help
thx in advance
Ulrich

#2

You might try adding gnome-altamixer in terminal (use sudo apt install gnome-altamixer). Then run gnome-altamixer in terminal to set PCM to about 80%. When I had no sound, the things you did plus this installation fixed it on my PPC. I did not add the snd_aoa_codec_onyx to my modules file.

#3

+tomi
In terminal I got the reply gnome-altamixer could not be found.
What is the source of this app?
In settings I only have the sources canonical and launchpad activated.
[ Opended Ubuntu Software-Center to look there, but this is unbelievable slow. Still loading as I write this. Seems to be another malfunction. ]

#4

+tome
Got it. It is alsamixer (not alta…). I already had that installed.
Set PCM as advised and that did not make any difference.
Then deleted the snd_aoa_codec_onyx entry … and now it works!! At least with headphones plugged in. Will let you know if this is a general solution.

#5

I am really sorry about the typo. I usually re-read things like that
before hitting the send button.

#6

+tomi
thx again for your advise. Sound works fine now. Both with headphones plugged in in the front and speakers plugged in in the rear.

To all:
Solutions and fixes given in several forums look a bit inconsistent to me. On my box the one and only entry I had in the file /etc/modules (i.e. kernel modules to load at boot time) was:
apm_emu

Sound on my G5 PPC works well after adding the following lines to /etc/modules:
snd_aoa
snd_aoa_soundbus
snd_aoa_i2sbus
snd_aoa_fabric_layout
snd_aoa_codec_tas

I had also added the following entry:
snd_aoa_codec_onyx
but this needed to be deleted.