Audio Fix for 2015 Google Chromebook Pixel II?

Problem

Audio does not work through the built-in speakers and headphone jack.

Environment

• 2015 Google Chromebook Pixel II
• Ubuntu 18.04.3 LTS
• Kernel 5.0.0-37-generic

Audio Devices

aplay -l
**** List of PLAYBACK Hardware Devices ****
card 0: HDMI [HDA Intel HDMI], device 3: HDMI 0 [HDMI 0] Subdevices: 1/1 Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 0: HDMI [HDA Intel HDMI], device 7: HDMI 1 [HDMI 1] Subdevices: 1/1 Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 0: HDMI [HDA Intel HDMI], device 8: HDMI 2 [HDMI 2] Subdevices: 1/1 Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 0: HDMI [HDA Intel HDMI], device 9: HDMI 3 [HDMI 3] Subdevices: 1/1 Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 0: HDMI [HDA Intel HDMI], device 10: HDMI 4 [HDMI 4] Subdevices: 1/1 Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 1: bdwrt5677 [bdw-rt5677], device 0: System Playback/Capture (*) [] Subdevices: 1/1 Subdevice #0: subdevice #0

Research

This Github page seems to have a fix for kernel 4.16.13. Although I have not tried it due to the difference in kernel versions.

This page is dated from 2016 and describes configuring the touchpad, touchscreen, and sound on Ubuntu 16.04. Touch seems to work on 18.04.

Questions

In 2020, what is the correct way to enable audio on this computer?

2 Answers

****[Start Preamble] Note that this is not my work!!

There was a website that had very good instructions on how to do this - it is now down and can no longer be found. A cache of these instructions on how to setup a Chromebook Pixel 2 with Linux can still be found on The Wayback Machine here.

( note that the scripts referred to can be found at this link ..

These instructions still work for me - I was able to set up sound on a 2015 Chromebook Pixel LS running Ubuntu Studio 19.10 on Jan. 31st 2020 without issues.

Also note that you do not need to clone the whole repository!!! it is 2GB and a lot of the custom work to make the Chromebook LS work is now integrated into the linux kernel.

You just need the stuff in the "setup/scripts" folder here - you can copy them on a script by script basis as needed. I used the keyboard and media keys ones as those are pretty cool to have working right. [End Preamble]****

.

Sound (Output)

While the linux-samus kernel by itself allows you to see the onboard sound device, the bdw-rt5677, it doesn’t completely configure that device to be used for output:

output of aplay -l showing bdw-rt5677 device

There comes a script with the linux-samus repo to automatically fix this. Interestingly, this script never worked for me out-of-the-box in either GaOS1 (vivid) or GaOS2 beta (xenial). I had to follow the instructions near the bottom of linux-samus README manually. The same script, however, works almost flawlessly in Ubuntu 16.04 as installed by Linux Mint 18!

Just run the sound.sh script: (note by SteveHNM - this should say " run enable-audio.sh " ]

cd linux-samus/scripts/setup/sound
./sound.sh

After this, you should find new bdw-rt5677 devices in your Sound settings:

note added by SteveHNM after running

enable-audio.sh

, run

enable-speakers.sh

to start sound out of the speakers. enable-audio.sh just enables the card then enable-speakers.sh gets the card pumping sound to speakers. You can also setup media keys using instructions at the end of this post to adjust volume + setup brightness keys.

Note that volume through headphones is really really low, even with over-amplification. This has something to do with needing to turn on the headphone amplifier separately for the bdw-rt5677 chip each time the headphones are inserted into the socket - more info here. Not sure how to do this yet BUT it is just a setting in alsamixer - just have not found it yet. Will post here as soon as I do.

Microphone

After running the

./sound.sh

script (Added by SteveHNM - that should be enable-audio.sh) , you should be able to add the microphone devices by running the following commands:

pulseaudio -k && pulseaudio -d

Volume & Sound

Simply navigate to “Sound and Media” in the nav list to the left in the Keyboard Shortcuts dialog of the "Settings" App. We’re just going to use F8-F10 as mute, volume down, and volume up, respectively.

Brightness

Increasing and decreasing the brightness of the screen will be mapped to F7 and F6, respectively. For the backlight of the keyboard, we will use ALT + - and ALT + =. The scripts for controlling brightness are located in linux-samus/scripts/setup/brightness/.

For the scripts to work, we need to apply the correct permissions to some system files on every boot first. That’s what the enable-brightness.sh script is for. To run enable-brightness.sh on every boot, just run

sudo ./setup.systemd.sh 

(added by SteveHNM - this file is in the scripts folder in the repository under "setup/brightness here )

You should also run

sudo ./enable-brightness.sh

once, so that you can test your keyboard shortcuts before restarting. (added by SteveHNM - this file is also in the scripts folder in the repository under "setup/brightness" )

The commands brightness and keyboard_led are copied into /usr/local/bin by the

setup.systemd.sh script

(added by SteveHNM - this file is also in the scripts folder in the repository under "setup/brightness" )

Now, we can establish our actual keyboard shortcuts:

Purpose Command Key Combo

Increase Screen Brightness brightness --increase F6

Decrease Screen Brightness brightness --decrease F7 Increase

Keyboard Brightness keyboard_led --increase ALT + = Increase

Keyboard Brightness keyboard_led --decrease ALT + =

An update on how to turn on the headphone amp on the Samus / Chromebook Pixel using alsamixer to deal with low sound volume when using headphones.

Am SteveHNM but posting as guest as I forgot my username and password for the original account and need to track this for the next time I install linux on one of these boxen.

To turn on the headphone amp, you need to turn on three switches for output on the bdw-rt5677 card AFTER carrying out all the setup described above to enable the card properly.

The steps described here are specifically and only for turning on the headphone amp on the Samus so that volume is reasonable after installing Ubuntu 20.04. As awlays YMMV.

to do this

open up a terminal install alsamixer if not installed by installing alsa-utils

 sudo apt-get remove --purge alsa-utils sudo apt-get install alsa-utils

run alsamixer

 alsamixer

pick the correct card ( bdw-rt5677) using F6 ( make sure that it is not already mapped to volume down, if it is, it will not work and will need to be un-mapped first in "Settings" > "Keyboard Shortcuts"

Scroll all the way right until you see the items labelled "Out1", "Out2" and "Out3". Toggle these on (they will be showing "MM" which stands for "Muted" .

Toggling the outputs on is done using the m key; hit once to toggle between on and off ( "MM" for Mute / off and "00" for on ). Each switch does just one channel - left or right.

"Out1" - Left headphone channel amp off / on toggle

"Out2" - Right headphone channel amp off / on toggle

"Out3" - Who knows? off / on toggle - but better on than off

Image of the settings (Out1, Out2 and Out3 ) that need to be toggled from "MM" to '00" here