Sound

The officially supported way to get sound on Chimera is through the PipeWire project. Plain ALSA is not supported. PulseAudio is also not supported (but PipeWire provides compatibility).

In longer term, other sound servers may become options, but PipeWire will remain a well supported default.

PipeWire

To install PipeWire:

# apk add pipewire

This will also automatically install WirePlumber, the default session manager.

The primary supported way to get the daemon running is through a user service. The user services are enabled by default unless masked in apk.

You can either restart your user session or start them manually:

$ dinitctl start wireplumber

Typically you will also want PulseAudio compatibility:

$ dinitctl start pipewire-pulse

You can check whether it’s running:

$ dinitctl list
[[+]     ] boot
[{+}     ] system
[{+}     ] dbus (pid: 1040)
[{+}     ] pipewire-pulse (pid: 1046)
[{+}     ] pipewire (pid: 1044)
[{+}     ] wireplumber (pid: 1045)

If you wish to mask the default links (and therefore prevent the services from coming up without being explicitly enabled), you can do something like:

# apk add '!pipewire-dinit-links' '!wireplumber-dinit-links'

This is generally useful when you want fine-grained control over which users PipeWire is run for (i.e. it will not run automatically for each user that log in on tty). Afterwards, you will want to dinitctl enable the necessary services under each user you want.