Hardware
Contents
Hardware¶
Table of Contents¶
Hardware introspection¶
Printing keystrokes¶
This is conventionally handled by the window manager, such as X or recently Wayland.
In both cases xev or showkey can be used to monitor input events and print them to the terminal, along with the key name and scan or key codes respectively.
Graphics cards¶
The official Debian wiki has a great overview of graphic driver installations depending on the hardware you are using.
PCI wattage¶
The power ratings of graphics cards is discussed in detail on the graphics card hub. In brief
PCI provides 75 watts
8-pin connector 150 watts
6-pin connector 75 watts
nVidia¶
List of compatible hardware is here. The nVidia installation follows the following process:
Identify hardware:
lspci -nn | egrep -i "3d|display|vga"
Fetch the Kernel headers (amd64):
sudo apt install linux-headers-amd64
The process varies depending on which Debian version you are using. Since I am using Debian 10.5 Buster, I will first add the buster-backports to my apt sources:
In /etc/apt/sources.list we add
# buster-backports
deb http://deb.debian.org/debian buster-backports main contrib non-free
we then install the packages with
sudo apt update && sudo apt install -t buster-backports nvidia-driver
This performs upstream device detection to fetch the correct driver for your card. Finally, reboot your systemto complete the installation.
CUDA and cuDNN¶
Installing CUDA is directed in the wiki. In short, we can install CUDA 10 with backports
sudo apt -t buster-backports install nvidia-cuda-dev nvidia-cuda-toolkit
which will install nvcc for gcc >5.3.1.
For cuDNN, we need to create a development account on the nVidia website
The full installation process is documented on the nVidia site.
Troubleshooting¶
When installing the nvidia-driver, I encountered this issue
sudo apt install -t buster-backports nvidia-driver
which outputted
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
Some packages could not be installed. This may mean that you have
requested an impossible situation or if you are using the unstable
distribution that some required packages have not yet been created
or been moved out of Incoming.
The following information may help to resolve the situation:
The following packages have unmet dependencies:
nvidia-driver : Depends: nvidia-kernel-dkms (= 440.100-1~bpo10+1) but it is not going to be installed or
nvidia-kernel-440.100
Recommends: nvidia-persistenced but it is not installable
E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages.
My fix was to ensure consistency in the /etc/apt/sources.list; e.g.
deb http://ftp.ch.debian.org/debian/ buster main contrib non-free
deb http://ftp.ch.debian.org/debian/ buster-backports main contrib non-free
I have buster and buster-backports both configured as main and non-free.
Sound Configuration¶
Especially on headless installations of *nix, some sound device configuration is required.
NB: In most cases, the user wont succeed in configuring the sound unless they are also part of the audio group.
ALSA¶
Advanced Linux Sound Architecture replaces the original Open Sound System (OSS) on *nix.
There are conflicting methods for the installation on different *nix systems, but I had personal success on Debian with
sudo apt-get install libasound2 alsa-utils alsa-oss
The seemingly magic configuration step that is missed out in a lot of guides is to create the file
/etc/modprobe.d/default.conf
with contents
options snd_hda_intel index=1
There is some information as to how this works in this wiki entry.
You’ll probably also need to add
pcm.!default {
type hw
card 1
}
ctl.!default {
type hw
card 1
}
to ~/.asoundrc, at least I did on Buster.
ALSA auto-configuration¶
If the above did not work, or if you altered your sound hardware, a quick-fix for a lot of ALSA related issues is to run the init command:
sudo alsactl init
From the manual:
init tries to initialize all devices to a default state. If device is not known, error code 99 is returned.
CMUS with ALSA¶
To get CMUS to use ALSA, we edit the ~/.cmus/autosave file and change the configuration to
set dsp.alsa.device=default
set mixer.alsa.device=default
set mixer.alsa.channel=PCM
set output_plugin=alsa
If it fails to start, add the line
set output_plugin=alsa
in (a file which you’ll probably have to create) .cmus/rc.
Hardware specifications¶
As stated in the Debian wiki, the assigned indexes to sound cards can be found with
cat /proc/asound/cards
To see the hardware device names, you can also use
lspci -nn | grep -i audio
Also useful is
lsmod | grep snd
to see the kernel sound modules.
With ALSA installed, you can also identify the sound devices using
aplay -l