Sound with No Desktop

Sound is potentially a non issue with modern Linux systems, simply working; you login to your desktop, turn-up the volume and play some tunes. In this tutorial we will be using a minimal Debian 13 installation with no desktop environment and will enable sound manually: you may have to do this to get working audio on custom window manager and minimalist desktop setups.

Installing All We Need

The audio driver will likely be loaded and ready to use; we just don’t have anything installed to use it. We can confirm that our sound hardware is detected and active with the following commands run with super user privileges:

lspci | grep Audio
dmesg | grep snd

If the above confirms that audio hardware is ready we can install some utilities and libraries. Modern Linux as a minimum will require installation of ALSA (Advanced Linux Sound Architecture) libraries and tools. Many applications will depend on extensions to the sound system: the modern way to do this is with PipeWire which can also offer compatibility for other sound systems including PulseAudio and JACK. With super user access we can install the required software with:

apt install alsa-utils pipewire pipewire-alsa

Enabling Sound

Now that everything is installed we need to start some services for applications to communicate through. You can simply logout then back in to your user account and the required services should be enabled: but if logging out is inconvenient you can start the services with:

systemctl --user start pipewire.service
systemctl --user start pipewire-pulse.service
systemctl --user start wireplumber.service

You may need to adjust volume controls and the command : alsamixer provides easy to navigate controls. PipeWire has a single “Master” control, but if you need to adjust individual source levels you can access devices by pressing F6 :

alsamixer
aplay /usr/share/sounds/alsa/Noise.wav

Make a Server Talk!

Do you have a remote server somewhere and want to send messages to people around it? you can ssh into the sound enabled server as a user in the audio group and speak, providing you have an audio device attached or built-in as is the case with a Mac :

# apt install speech-dispatcher
$ spd-say "Hello, can you attach my flash drive please"