Getting sound to work on the Raspberry Pi
I wanted to try out audio on the Raspberry Pi, using the Raspbian OS. Here's how I got it to work. The installer I used for Raspbian was the minimal network installer by hifi . This will use up only about 150MB of space and will not install a desktop, so you'll save a lot of resources with this approach. After installing Raspbian, this is what I needed to do in order to get sound output. First, login as root (default password = raspbian - change it ASAP!). Update the package list for APT , the package installer tool of Debian: apt-get update Install ALSA . apt-get install alsa-base At this point I discovered that the minimal installer doesn't include the sound card module of the raspi. Alsa's aplay is a wav file player, and with it I could check which sound devices are available: aplay -L The output: null Discard all samples (playback) or generate zero samples (capture) ... and when trying to enable the sound card module, I got an error: ...