[Tfug] No sound, Ubuntu 8.10

[John Gruenenfelder]

On Sat, Nov 22, 2008 at 09:59:37PM -0700, Jim March wrote:
>On Sat, Nov 22, 2008 at 9:26 PM,  <arizray at comcast.net> wrote:
>> A common error occurs after upgrading to Ubuntu 8.10 whereby the sound does not work. I have perused several forums and tried several fixes to no avail. I went into system>preferences>sound and tried to test and reset parameters but that doesn't work.
>>
>> Anyone know a workaround?
>
>Well yeah, I know one...pretty radical, but it works.
>
>Pull out ALSA and PulseAudio and splice in OSS4.
>
>In my case, I have a laptop with Intel HDA sound that during
>Intrepid's beta had problems whereby the sound would fade and
>disappear when I plugged headphones in.  Pulling the headphones out
>didn't restore sound to the lappy's internal speakers.  I installed
>OSS4 and it worked great, then once Intrepid hit release did a clean
>install and sound was fine...until a couple of weeks ago when an
>update broke sound yet again, in the same fashion.

<rant>

It seems that, in general, the problem is the "Intel HD Audio".  By in
general I mean that it seems to cause a wake of anger wherever it goes.

A big part of the issue is that HDA seems to be more of a container than
anything else as there are approximately 4.2e534 separate codecs that fall
under Intel HDA with more coming every day.  And, best of all, they all differ
in various ways and often need hacks or parameters to get them working
properly.  This excessive number of codecs also has a side benefit of making
the snd-hda-intel module gigantic.

I first used it on my 2yo laptop, though fortunately it only needed a little
hand holding.  Now I've got it on the new mobo for my Mythbox.  It needed the
model=3stack-dig parameter to make it work.

What retarded monkey designed this abomination?  I don't recall there being
even 1% the number of issues with ac97, the last widespread generic audio
codec/chipset.

Feel free to tell me if I'm really off base here, but HDA seems to be a huge
headache.

</rant>


Ummm... so, in answer to the original question, I would suggest Googling for
Ubuntu + hda_intel + your chipset model.  You should be able to learn more
about your particular HDA variant via lspci.


-- 
--John Gruenenfelder    Systems Manager, MKS Imaging Technology, LLC.
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