HP 14A G5 Chromebook No Audio

Hello everyone,

I’m new to this forum and I am wondering if I can have some help.

I am very familiar with Linux and figured that I’d install it on a Chromebook. My Chromebook is an HP 14A G5 model with the Careena board and an AMD embedded GPU (Stoney Ridge type). Like many folks, I too am having issues with the audio and nothing works. Nothing.

I’m currently running Linux Mint 22.1 on it and I’ve also tried other distros too - Debian for sure does NOT work on my device (unless I’m using the wrong one?). Is there a way I can get the speakers and headphone jack to work on this thing?

Any and all help is appreciated! Thanks!

I don’t know about the headphone jack, but audio should work via this GitHub repo: GitHub, although I recommend to switch your distro because it isn’t listed in the repo, therefore you have to install the packages yourself. I like your choice of using Mint, because it is a really good Distro, but I would recommend you to use something like Arch, because its lightweight and doesn’t take up much resources, since the Chromebooks are crappy anyway. About that Debian issue: I found a similar issue like yours on the askubuntu site, one answer recommends to do some fuckery around with the script of mrchromebox, just follow his guide and (maybe) it will work. Hope I could help!

Please don’t post if you aren’t going to post relevant/helpful info. Running my audio script does nothing on this device and that askubuntu post is 8 years old.

To get audio on careena, you need a custom kernel with patches applied to fix the audio drivers. Install the debs here to get the kernel Index of /stoneyridge-kernel/ubuntu-6.14.0-15.15_all/. Even though it says ubuntu, it should still work on debian.

My apologies for not being clearer. I’m actually running Mint on Ubuntu.

I did install the 6.14 kernel and unfortunately I’m still getting dummy output. Is there something I’m missing?

UCM probably. You need a recent distro and Mint is not recent.

Heh, you were right…

I made my own UCM module and rebooted and now I have headphone audio!!! I’ll put what I did on here soon.

Okay bear with me, I’m going to try my best to share what I did:

First things first - get the latest kernel. Visit @WeirdTreeThing’s link above and download all three files to your device and install them. Reboot and make sure you boot into the newest kernel you installed.

Once you’ve rebooted, run the following command:

cat /proc/asound/cards

In here, you should see the missing sound card identified. Weirdly enough, Linux DOES recognize the card - it just fails to initialize it properly. Mine returned

1 [acpd7219m98357 ]: acpd7219m98357 - acpd7219m98357 Google-Careena-rev6

Make a note of this.

NEXT - You’ll need to run some commands. cd into the directory titled:

cd /usr/share/alsa/ucm2/AMD

and run an ls command to see what’s in there. You’ll most likely already have some in here but I doubt it’s the right sound card set in your device. Mine was acpd7219m98357. The directory didn’t exist so I created it.

sudo mkdir /usr/share/alsa/ucm2/AMD/acpd7219m98357 && cd /usr/share/alsa/ucm2/AMD/acpd7219m98357

Once you’re in here, we’ll need to create a UCM file for your soundcard, so run a nano (or vim, or…well, whatever editor you like to use)

sudo nano acpd7219m98357.conf

And add this in:

SectionUseCase.“HiFi” {
File “HiFi.conf”
Comment “HiFi Playback and Capture”
}

SectionDefaults [
“HiFi”
]

That’s the first conf created. Now the next one once you’ve saved the previous:

sudo nano HiFi.conf

And insert this:

SectionVerb {
EnableSequence [
cset “name=‘Speaker Playback Switch’ on”
cset “name=‘Speaker Playback Volume’ 80”
cset “name=‘Capture Volume’ 80”
cset “name=‘Capture Switch’ on”
]
DisableSequence [
cset “name=‘Speaker Playback Switch’ off”
cset “name=‘Capture Switch’ off”
]
Value {
PlaybackPCM “hw:1,0”
CapturePCM “hw:1,0”
}
}

Save this file too. Once you’ve done both of these, reboot the system, boot into the new kernel, and run

aplay -l
alsamixer

AND WOW LOOK AT THAT IT’S THERE NOW!!! AND IT WORKS TOO???

Yes…yes it does.

But wait - there’s STILL no audio? After doing all that??? >:(

We need to go into alsamixer now. Run this command:

alsamixer -c 1

And look for anything that looks like output and/or input that may be muted. You may have to play something in the background and turn up/down levels, mute/unmute, etc.

After that NOW you should have working audio, at least from the headphones. I’m digging further into why the internal speaker still shows no sound but this is exactly what I was looking for!

Or, you could just get the UCM that I upstreamed alsa-ucm-conf/ucm2/AMD/acp-da7219-rt5682-max98357 at master · alsa-project/alsa-ucm-conf · GitHub

i have the fix to your problem your facing i faced same issue created a bash script to fix it check out my github repo debian-audio-fix/README.md at main · apex064/debian-audio-fix · GitHubmy repo