Does the subwoofer in your ASUS laptop not work under Fedora?

published Jan 15, 2012, last modified Jun 26, 2013

Here's a hacky fix that worked for me. Works for Ubuntu too.

OK, if you are trying to enable the subwoofer laptop, you will probably not succeed because the kernel (as of 3.1.0) does not have the necessary ALSA codec configuration that enables the output pin for the subwoofer.

Here are the steps to work around that:

  • Download this file: http://people.canonical.com/~diwic/temp/alsa-hda-diwic-asus-g73jh-dkms_1.0.23.diwic_all.deb
  • Unpack it using ark or some other archiver.  Inside of it there will be two files:
    • control.tar.gz
    • data.tar.gz
  • Unpack data.tar.gz in a temporary directory.  You'll note a directory usr was created
  • Inside that directory, there is a src/alsa-hda-diwic-asus-g73jh-1.0.23.diwic -- move that alsa-hda... directory into /usr/src, and change its ownership to root using chown -R
  • Inside that directory which you just moved to /usr/src, there is a dkms.conf file with an OBSOLETE line -- bump the version number in that OBSOLETE line to 3.99.1 or something high
  • Install the dkms RPM using yum install -- also install the RPM called kernel-devel
  • Now run the command dkms add alsa-hda-diwic-asus-g73jh/1.0.23.diwic
  • Now run the command dkms install alsa-hda-diwic-asus-g73jh/1.0.23.diwic
  • Now let's test -- to test, kill all applications using the audio devices (like PulseAudio), rmmod snd-hda-intel snd-hda-codec-hdmi snd-hda-codec-realtek, modprobe snd-hda-intel and start PulseAudio or other audio playback applications again.  Play some audio -- you should hear and feel the subwoofer playing now
  • Reboot to the same kernel (or redo the procedure above for the newer kernel you just rebooted into), and your audio drivers should have enabled the subwoofer
Keywords
ASUS ALSA Fedora Linux