Raptor Lake Linux Installation: No Sound Cards Found on ThinkPad L14

Raptor Lake Linux Installation: No Sound Cards Found on ThinkPad L14

In this article, we'll guide you through the process of installing Arch Linux on a ThinkPad L14 with a Raptor Lake-P/U/Hc AVS audio controller. Although the installation may appear to be successful, you might encounter an issue where no sound cards are found.

Fresh Installation of Arch Linux with No Sound

After a fresh installation of Arch Linux on the ThinkPad L14 with the Raptor Lake audio controller, running the command "lspci | grep -i audio" returns the following:

However, when executing "aplay -l" to list all audio devices, the output would be empty:

This issue arises because the necessary audio drivers are not included in the base Arch Linux installation. We'll cover the steps required to resolve this problem in the following sections.

Identifying the Audio Driver

First, we need to determine the correct audio driver for the Raptor Lake-P/U/Hc AVS audio controller. A useful tool for this task is the "alsa-info" script. To obtain the script, execute the following command:

Next, run the script and save the output as a text file:

In the generated output.txt file, look for the "Manufacturer" and "Model" lines under the "DMI string" section. In this case, we are looking for:

Based on this information, we can deduce that the recommended sound driver for the Raptor Lake audio controller on the ThinkPad L14 is the "snd\_hda\_intel" driver.

Enabling the snd\_hda\_intel Audio Driver

Now that we have identified the correct sound driver, we can proceed to load it manually. Execute the following command to load the "snd\_hda\_intel" driver:

After running this command, verify the audio devices with the "aplay -l" command:

As illustrated above, the sound card is now detected. Next, we need to make this change permanent.

Making the Audio Driver Change Permanent

To ensure that the "snd…