Debian on 730i Nvidia Board w/HDMI

Put together a machine to run my TV at 1080p. The board is a evga 113-yw-e115-tr. Installed Debian 5.0 (amd64) from a usb key. The biggest hiccup was getting sound output via the HDMI port.
The major steps were:

• Install alsa-sources from unstable (to version 1.0.19) (apt-get ...; m-a a-i alsa)


• Install libasound2 from unstable


• Install nvidia-kernel-source from unstable (m-a a-i nvidia)

Edit: When trying to repeat this process, I discovered that hdmi output would not load without an up-to-date nvidia module that had been not only loaded, but initialized by the X driver.

This gets the HDMI device into Alsa's view:

proost:~$ aplay -l
**** List of PLAYBACK Hardware Devices ****
card 0: NVidia [HDA NVidia], device 0: ALC888 Analog [ALC888 Analog]
  Subdevices: 1/1
  Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 0: NVidia [HDA NVidia], device 1: ALC888 Digital [ALC888 Digital]
  Subdevices: 1/1
  Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 0: NVidia [HDA NVidia], device 3: NVIDIA HDMI [NVIDIA HDMI]
  Subdevices: 1/1
  Subdevice #0: subdevice #0

It took a while to discover that, and then I found that I could playback wav files via aplay -Dplughw:0,3 .... After setting up a basic asound.conf I discovered that not all players output 48kHz. I found some hints that alsa can ensure a specific output rate and that worked well. Then I discovered that dmix (multiple streams) wasn't working. The net result (/etc/asound.conf) is:

pcm.!default {
    type plug
    slave.pcm "dmixer"
}
pcm.dsp0 {
    type plug
    slave.pcm "dmixer"
}
pcm.dmixer
{
    type dmix
    ipc_key 1234
    slave {
        pcm "digital-hw"
        rate 48000
    }
}
pcm.digital-hw {
        type hw
        card 0
        device 3
}
ctl.digital-hw {
        type hw
        card 0
}
ctl.mixer0 {
    type hw
    card 0
}

With the slave line alsa ensures that output is at 48kHz.

The other hiccup was getting the picture to fill the screen. Standard TV signals crop the edges a fair bit. This didn't show up on the vga cable, but it did for HDMI. After searching the Internet far and wide, it turned out that I can set the picture size to "Just Scan" and it works beautifully. The only other issue was setting the default font size to be less huge (Option "DPI" "120 x 120") in xorg.conf.