How to switch to full initramfs? (audio not working on fresh Jaunty install)

[KeithZG]

I just did an expert install on my Acer Aspire One, but apparently I'm not nearly expert enough Basically, I chose to go with a minimal initramfs, since after all it's a netbook which I need to start up as quickly as possible, and it only has an 8GB SSD.

Well, sound doesn't seem to work at all despite that in theory it should on that netbook (and has on friends' netbooks I've installed *buntu on), and actually even if that isn't the problem I'd like to know, how can you reverse that decision and re-generate a full initramfs? If the answer is out there on The Internets then I guess my google-fu is weak (and neither my search for "full initramfs" nor "minimal initramfs" came up with any search results on the forum).

I've actually spent an hour or two customizing things already, but I guess it wouldn't be too bad to just re-install...still, it'd be nice to know regardless, and there must be a way, no?

[dibl]

Re: How to switch to full initramfs? (audio not working on fresh Jaunty install)

I don't know about modifying initramfs (sounds like a bad idea to me ...), but I would first want to know whether the Live CD provides audio, when booted on that netbook. If yes, then it looks like your initramfs adventure has messed it up. But if not, then the audio issue would be unrelated to initramfs.

Also, if it does work when booted on the Live CD, it would be a good idea to investigate which driver is being used, etc., so you can make sure you use that on the installed OS.

[KeithZG]

Re: How to switch to full initramfs? (audio not working on fresh Jaunty install)

Well, I'm not thinking about modifying initramfs per se, it's just that when I installed (as it always does in expert mode) it asked me if I wanted to install a full initramfs, or a reduced one with only the drivers needed for the computer. I went for the latter; now I'd like to just switch back to the unmodified default, I just have no idea how to do that.

Uhh as stated though it's a netbook, so without a USB CD drive I'm not really going to be running any Live CDs on it anytime soon I just installed it with my PXE server, booted from the network doing the "netinstall" and all that jazz. I do know that Kubuntu-KDE3 at least works with this netbook, since I installed that (in that case using unetbootin to make a bootable USB stick out of the Kubuntu-KDE3 iso on an entirely identical model netbook that a friend of mine bought (she's far more comfortable with KDE3 than Windows, and who can blame her?). Not at all a bad plan to re-image that again on one of my spare drives and see what driver it loads, though, good point.

[dibl]

Re: How to switch to full initramfs? (audio not working on fresh Jaunty install)

Aha. OK, yeah, I keep a I/O Max USB optical drive around for just such problems.

I would guess the installer has guessed wrong in choosing the "minimal" drivers and modules for your netbook, leaving you with no audio driver, or the wrong audio driver. Just guessing ....

[flarson]

Re: How to switch to full initramfs? (audio not working on fresh Jaunty install)

What you are looking for is in /etc/initramfs-tools/initramfs.conf. It will not help with your audio problem though. There is not need to have audio drivers in the initrd. They will be found after pivotroot is used to mount the real root. Your audio problems are something else.

[KeithZG]

Re: How to switch to full initramfs? (audio not working on fresh Jaunty install)

Aha. OK, yeah, I keep a I/O Max USB optical drive around for just such problems.

Heh yeah I've been meaning to get one for ages, but somehow I never seem to find any decently priced ones. Actually, awhile back while I was working at $RETAIL_CHAIN I found a Sony USB DVD writer on clearance, but one of the cashiers decided to sell it to a customer straight from the holds cabinet with my name still on it, grr. So I've long just fiddled with syslinux, used to just mount .iso files, copy everything, then translate the CD's isolinux configuration into a syslinux one. Unetbootin has simplified my life tremendously since you can just point it towards an ISO file and tell it to do all that work for ya

What you are looking for is in /etc/initramfs-tools/initramfs.conf. It will not help with your audio problem though. There is not need to have audio drivers in the initrd. They will be found after pivotroot is used to mount the real root. Your audio problems are something else.

Thanks for the information! Yeah, in the end it turned out not to be anything to do with initramfs (which I guess I'm not too surprised about, but it was a good opportunity to learn more about initramfs anyways), surprise surprise it was some issues with pulseaudio. It all seems to work just fine now