Korora laptop / Trisquel 7 audio not working

Question

I have Trisquel 7 netinstall installed on a ThinkPenguin Korora laptop.

nik@Penguin-Korora:~$ lspci|grep Audio
00:03.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation Haswell-ULT HD Audio Controller (rev 09)
00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation Lynx Point-LP HD Audio Controller (rev 04)

I can't hear any sound when watching webm videos in Abrowser, and I've made sure the channels in alsamixer look good. Strangely, there is no "PCM" channel in alsamixer .. could this be the issue? If so, how do I solve it?

When I try to play an mp3 with VLC, I get this error:

nik@Penguin-Korora:~$ cvlc music/fade.mp3
VLC media player 2.1.4 Rincewind (revision 2.1.4-0-g2a072be)
[0x2670978] pulse audio output error: PulseAudio server connection failure: Connection refused
[0x266d568] dummy interface: using the dummy interface module...
ALSA lib pcm_dmix.c:1022:(snd_pcm_dmix_open) unable to open slave
[0x2670978] alsa audio output error: cannot open ALSA device "default": No such file or directory
[0x2670978] main audio output error: Audio output failed
[0x2670978] main audio output error: The audio device "default" could not be used: No such file or directory.
[0x2670978] main audio output error: module not functional
[0x7faf20c04608] main decoder error: failed to create audio output

Should I install pulseaudio? If so, is there any setup I need to do to get audio working?

Also, here's my proc/asound/cards file:

$ cat /proc/asound/cards
 0 [HDMI           ]: HDA-Intel - HDA Intel HDMI
                      HDA Intel HDMI at 0xb0710000 irq 65
 1 [PCH            ]: HDA-Intel - HDA Intel PCH
                      HDA Intel PCH at 0xb0714000 irq 64

Answer 1

You have two sound "cards": the HDMI output of the GPU, and all the analog stuff.

The HDMI controller happens to be found first, so it's the default device. If you wanted to use it, a device name like hdmi or spdif would work.

To make the "PCH" device the default one,

• use PulseAudio, and set this in the PA configuration; or
• use the sound card configuration tool of your distribution, if it has one; or

• put the following into /etc/asound.conf:

  defaults.ctl.card PCH
  defaults.pcm.card PCH