This weekend at Bazcamp I acquired a new little nettop box, the Foxconn nT330i. When I got home from the tent hacking goodness, I grabbed a USB install of Lucid and threw it on the box. First of all, HOLY BALLS WAS THAT A FAST AND PAINLESS INSTALL. I never get to see the main install because I need encrypted root, so I always have to use the alternate install disk.
Once I got Lucid installed, I thought I'd try out installing Boxee. I'd never done this before, so I had no idea what to expect. After Boxee install, Boxee was ungodly slow. The fix was as easy as asking Ubuntu to install the proprietary Nvidia driver (boo). After that, Boxee was fast.
When I finally hooked it up through HDMI to my 1080P TV (and witnessing the hawtness that is Ubuntu in ten-freakin'-eighty!), I noticed I wasn't getting sound through the HDMI. In the Sound Properties dialog, I had the correct output set. I couldn't figure out what was going on.
Ignore what everyone else tells you: Lucid's version of the Nvidia proprietary driver is fine. Don't install some lame PPA. You don't have to add yourself to the audio group. Here's how you fix it:
-
From the terminal, type
alsamixer - Move over to the SPDIF outputs. You'll see that they are muted.
- Hit "m" to unmute all the SPDIF outputs.
- Hit escape.
- Enjoy sounds through HDMI.
That's it. I'm not sure if this is by design or if it's a bug (I suspect at least a UX bug if nothing else). I post here merely to add some good information to the Google searches I went on to try and fix this, because everything else was misleading.