2

Following the answer in Do I need any extra drivers for the Realtek waves maxx audio on my Dell XPS 17?, I'm trying to install audio driver for Dell XPS 15(L502X) from RealTek site. But I'm getting the following errors:

# ./install
.....Decompress Driver source v1.0.2x-5.18
Compile Driver........
./install: 19: ./install: ./configure: not found
make: *** No targets specified and no makefile found.  Stop.
make: *** No rule to make target `install'.  Stop.
./install: 23: ./install: ./snddevices: not found

Whats wrong?

Community
  • 1
Ruturaj Patil
  • 121

2 Answers2

1

What is wrong is that the install script has a very small bug in it which is very easy to correct.

If you run it, it will indeed display errors.

What to do ?

  1. open the install script in an editor
  2. change line 1 from #!/bin/sh to #!/bin/bash (just to be shure)
  3. change line 18 from cd alsa-driver-RTv5.18 to cd alsa-driver-RTv5.18/alsa

Save it and run sudo ./install

thom
  • 7,742
0

First check if you don't overload any parts in the mixing path by setting everything at 75% and check if the "bad-sound" problem is solved.

If not: read on.

One of the underestimated problems in Linux sound is samplerateconversion.

Let's say that you try to play a file with samplerate 48000, this will be converted by pulseaudio to 44100 and will be converted by ALSA to 48000 again because your sounddevice can't do 44100.

The pulseaudio samplerateconversion is OK, but the samplerateconversion of ALSA is of bad sound quality.

So best thing you can do is to set the output of pulseaudio to 48000 so that ALSA won't use samplerateconversion.

Edit the pulseaudio config: /etc/pulse/client.conf
change this:

; default-sample-format = s16le 
; default-sample-rate = 44100
; default-sample-channels = 2
; default-channel-map = front-left,front-right

to this:

; default-sample-format = s16le 
default-sample-rate = 48000
; default-sample-channels = 2
; default-channel-map = front-left,front-right

If all else fails, use OSS4 instead of ALSA+Pulseaudio. ( The soundquality of OSS4 is extremely good but expect some inconveniences)

thom
  • 7,742