Every time I install Linux, no matter what the distribution, I have the same problems; configuring video and audio. When I installed Debian 7.1 recently I documented the steps I took. Hopefully you’ll find something of use here.

My Hardware

Video: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] nee ATI RV710 [Radeon HD 4350]

Sound: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] nee ATI RV710/730 HDMI Audio [Radeon HD 4000 series]

Monitor: Dell SP2208WFP (with built in webcam)

WebCam: OmniVision Technologies, Inc. Monitor Webcam

Video and sound devices can be determined using lspci. The Webcam is a USB device so it can be determined using lsusb.

Video

For regular use the opensource Radeon display driver is considered adequate. If you’re a gamer or just want to squeeze every bit of performance out of your card then you might consider the AMD proprietary display driver. For my needs the opensource driver is fine.

On the first boot GNOME 3 failed to load. The installer recognized my video card and installed the correct package, xserver-xorg-video-radeon, but as documented on the wiki my card requires proprietary firmware. This firmware is available in non-free. The steps to install it are,

  1. Open up Synaptic Package Manager and select Settings, Repositories from the menu
  2. Tick the checkbox next to Non-DFSG-compatible Software (non-free)
  3. Click Close and then the Reload toolbar button
  4. Search for and install firmware-linux-nonfree
  5. Reboot

GNOME 3 should start successfully after the reboot.

Audio

When I didn’t hear any sound I thought I was going to be in for a world of pain with sound drivers, ALSA and PulseAudio. Luckily all I needed to do was select the right output device. My system has two sound devices, an onboard Intel device and the sound device on the AMD video card. My monitor is connected by HDMI. I have a soundbar on my monitor drawing it’s signal from the HDMI cable. All I needed to do was,

  1. Open up the System Settings
  2. Click the Sound icon
  3. In the Output tab select the HDMI audio device, i.e. RV710/730 HDMI Audio [Radeon HD 4000 series] Digital Stereo (HDMI)

Update (Aug-2014): HDMI audio is disabled by default in the kernel/audio driver. To enable it,

  1. Edit /etc/default/grub and append radeon.audio=1 to the GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT variable.
  2. Open a terminal execute sudo update-grub
  3. Reboot

Source: No sound on HDMI with Radeon driver

Webcam

My monitor has a built in Webcam. It’s an OmniVision Technologies, Inc. Monitor Webcam. I managed to get it working but it’s a bit hit and miss. When then uvcvideo kernel module is loaded it should create the device /dev/video0. Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn’t. To get it to work is a matter of removing the module and reloading. After two or three attempts it usually works. Not very satisfying but I don’t use it very often so I’m not that bothered.

$ sudo modprobe -r uvcvideo     # unload the module
$ sudo modprobe uvcvideo        # load the module

Once the module loads successfully and creates the /dev/video0 device you can use the Cheese application to test it.

Microphone

The mic didn’t appear to be working initially but as with audio out all I needed to do was select the right device and turn up the volume. I use the mic on my monitor (attached to the webcam).

  1. Open up the System Settings
  2. Click the Sound icon
  3. Select the Input tab
  4. Select the Monitor Webcam Analog Stero device
  5. Turn the volume up to 100%

After getting the hardware working these are the applications I installed.

Flash Player

The Flash Player package is avaiable from contrib.

  1. Open up Synaptic Package Manager and select Settings, Repositories from the menu
  2. Tick the checkbox next to DFSG-compatible Software with Non-Free Dependencies (contrib)
  3. Click Close and then the Reload toolbar button
  4. Search for and install flashplugin-nonfree
  5. Restart your browser if you

Reference: FlashPlayer on the Debian Wiki

Java Browser Plugin

Simply install the package icedtea-6-plugin.

gThumb

gThumb is a photo manager. I prefer it over the default, Shotwell, because it feels quicker and more lightweight. I already organise my photos in a year, month, day folder structure so I have no need for anything fancy.

While gThumb itself is very easy to install (the gthumb package) it was failing to properly list all the photos and videos in a directory containing one or more videos. The problem was it couldn’t find the image it uses to surround videos (to give the reel effect). The fix is simple,

$ sudo ln -s /usr/share/gthumb/ui/filmholes.png /usr/share/filmholes.png

Reference: Redhat Bug 842183 - Gthumb breaks file list on movies

Android Tools

The Android Tools are used when developing Android applications. After installing the Android SDK I found adb wouldn’t work. When I ran it it gave a “file not found”. The problem is down to missing shared libraries. Here are the steps I took to fix it,

$ sudo dpkg --add-architecture i386
$ sudo aptitude update
$ sudo aptitude install libstdc++6:i386 libgcc1:i386 zlib1g:i386 libncurses5:i386

Reference: Installing Android SDK tools on Debian Wheezy