OpenSuSE 12.3 Mac Mini No Sound And Keyboard Issues

Hi all,
I recently bought a new 2014 Mac Mini and installed OpenSuSE 12.3 on it.
It is running great and very fast. However, I still have 2 issues with it:

  1. Sound doesn’t work, neither internal speaker nor headphones. What do I have to do to set it up correctly? I already disabled Pulse Audio, but that did not bring any sound, either.
  2. The keyboard has strange mappings (ALT keys etc). I’d like to have it work like if I connected it to a regular PC; at least when using X11. Can anything be done about this?
    Can someone please help me out on this?
    Cheers
    Steffen

I can’t help wrt restoring sound if you have disabled pulse audio.

But if Pulse Audio is enabled, on most hardware sound (with pulse audio) should just work.

Does should work in YaST > Hardware > Sound under the test ?

Have you checked the mixer settings to ensure sound is not at 0% nor muted ?

With pulse audio enabled you can install pulse audio volume control (pavucontrol) and use that to tune your sound with different settings for each sound device and each multimedia application. Here are a couple of guides in different blog posts with guidance on pavucontrol:

If all else fails wrt sound, provide some more information please. You can do such by opening a konsole/xterm, and as a regular user, with Mac Mini connected to the internet, type the command:


/usr/sbin/alsa-info.sh

this will run a diagnostic script to obtain more information on your Mac mini’s sound configuration. Do not update if asked to update it. Select the SHARE/UPLOAD option to upload this to the internet and then let the script run to completion. After it is complete, look in the konsole/xterm and it will give you the URL/webaddress where the information was updated. Post that URL/webaddress here and we will look at it to see if there is anything misconfigured wrt your sound on your Mini Mac.

Hi oldcpu,

thanks for your help.

I checked the mixer settings and they all seem to be ok. Sound didn’t work with Pulse Audio enabled, too, and since I don’t want/need it anyway, I disabled it.
YaST doesn’t play the test sound.

Here’s the URL which also-info.sh displayed:

http://www.alsa-project.org/db/?f=d3bed049204735d74a194a9fcc40e07523aae1d0

Cheers
Steffen

There are two potential configurations that I see that could possibly be stumping you on this.

First, look at your PCs mixer. The speaker is at 0% which is equivalent to being muted:


**Simple mixer control 'Speaker',0**
  Capabilities: pvolume pswitch
  Playback channels: Front Left - Front Right
  Limits: Playback 0 - 127
  Mono:
  Front Left: Playback 0 **[0%]** -63.50dB] [on]
  Front Right: Playback 0 **[0%]** -63.50dB] [on]

Second, look at the order of the sound devices:


!!Soundcards recognised by ALSA
!!-----------------------------

** 0 [HDMI  [/b]         ]: HDA-Intel - HDA Intel HDMI
                      HDA Intel HDMI at 0xa0910000 irq 75
** 1 [PCH [/b]           ]: HDA-Intel - HDA Intel PCH
                      HDA Intel PCH at 0xa0914000 irq 76

and


!!Amixer output
!!-------------

!!-------Mixer controls for card 0 [HDMI]

Card hw:0 'HDMI'/'HDA Intel HDMI at 0xa0910000 irq 75'
........
!!-------Mixer controls for card 1 [PCH]

Card hw:1 'PCH'/'HDA Intel PCH at 0xa0914000 irq 76'

I think that makes it pretty clear that HDMI is card-0 and your nominal analog/digital sound is card-1. By default your applications will all send sound to card-0 and NOT to card-1. Hence unless you have HDMI audio setup you will here nothing.

Further, pulse audio, if you run and use the program pulse audio volume control (pavucontrol) will easily allow one to work around that, but pulse is disabled on your PC effectively making this more difficult.

Its clear to me from the above that none of those problems have anything to do with pulse.

My recommendation is to :

  1. turn up your speaker volume in your mixer, and

** 1. switch the order of your sound devices

Best of luck in this, and please post if doing the above causes any problems.

Kindest regards .**