Installing the Driver for the Echo Mia Midi

It's a great act of desperation whenever
I find myself downloading the most current
software from the developer's site. I'm
desperate. I've been downloading and
installing the software for my Echo Mia
card using this web page:

Matrix:Module-mia

I'm a Debian user and I greatly prefer it
when I can install a Debian package and it
just works. Currently, my Echo Mia Card
is not being recognized. I suspect
that it is because I need the firmware
software for the alsa project.

My first act of desperation has been to
download version 1.0.24 of the ALSA driver.

I've installed the driver using the following
command as suggested by the web page shown
above:

./configure --with-cards=mia --with-sequencer=yes ; make ; make install

When I do the type the following command,
I see a message concerning the Echo Mia
soundcard and firmware:

dmesg | more

I wonder if this page will help me download
the necessary firmware:

Contains firmware for ALSA devices - Medibuntu package

Looks like that is a bad idea. Downloading
a Ubuntu package for a Debian installation
is a bad idea.

Here's someone who is having the same problem:

Squeeze "upgrade," alsa will not load my sound module (echo mia). NO sound.

OK. Just did something scary. I downloaded
the firmware pacakge from ALSA. It is located
here:

Latest Alsa Releases

I did the following commands:

bunzip alsa-firmware-1.0.24.1.tar.bz2
tar xvf alsa-firmware-1.0.24.1.tar
cd alsa-firmware-1.0.24.1
./configure
make install

I had no idea how to configure the
software for ECHO Mia so I just installed
every piece of firmware possible.

Prior to following the above steps,
I installed the 1.0.24 ALSA drivers.

The dmesg error that says drivers are
not found has gone away. However, this
has not solved the problem. Why do
I get no sound at all out of the card.

Stiil trying to figure it all out.

Ed Abbott

Installing Debian Packages with dpkg -i

I'm learning more about the various ways
to install Debian packages. One of the
tools available is a command line tool
called dpkg. Here's an article
on dpkg that I found helpful:

dpkg

It seems that dpkg is a very low level way
to install packages. In my case, I'm using dpkg
to install kermit, a software transfer program.

If I learn there is a better way, I will pursue
it. Perhaps there is a way to do the same thing
with aptget or aptitude. Both of
these commands are in some sense higher level. In
this case, higher level means use good package
management practices.

I'm learning as I go. I'm not at all an expert on
package management.

The dpkg command installs Debian packages
when you type this:

dpkg - i packagefile.deb

This is helpful when downloading packages from
the web. For example, I installed the commercial
drivers for my Nvidia grapics card with the above
command after down loading the .deb file
from Nvidia.

I'm grateful to all the hard work by people who
make all these packages possible.

Ed Abbott