How to fry speakers in your Chromebook

Lot of people asked me how I managed to fry left speaker in my Chromebook. There are also few which said that it is Ubuntu fault.

So today I used recovery to wipe out my installation of Ubuntu from device and decided to check under Chromium OS. And yes, I got nice smell of burnt plastic etc coming from left speaker area.

Why? Because it is kernel bug. Not Ubuntu, ALSA or user. Ok, it is a bit of user’s fault cause you should not have to play with ALSA mixer. But you can — all binaries are part of Chromium OS stable.

So let me give you needed steps:

  1. Boot Samsung Chromebook (ARM one) to Chromium OS
  2. Login or use guest session
  3. Run terminal (Ctrl+Alt+t)
  4. Run “alsamixer -c0”
  5. Set “Lineout” to highest value
  6. Unmute everything what starts with “Left” or “Right” (depends which speaker you do not like)
  7. Touch speakers (but better not for long)
  8. Hold “Power” button to shut down before it will burn though your desk.

In normal situation I would assume that sound driver will take care of combinations which may break your hardware. But looks like Chromebook developers did had such idea.

Is this howto useful? I think it is. Cause if you have device broken in some way and you want to get it replaced you can just run it and hope for replacement instead of repair.

And when next time someone will write me “go and fix ubuntu rather than putting blame on samsung. Its Ubuntu which is the cause” like I got in recent comment I will just ban such person from commenting.

chromebook kernel laptop linaro ubuntu