Sound

[Nigel Henry]

On Saturday 13 December 2008 00:35, John wrote:
> steve wrote:
> > John wrote:
> >> Hi,
> >>
> >> is there any way I can establish which sound drivers I need to get my
> >> Dell + Ubuntu laptop shouting at me? It's very silent ATM and tells me:
> >>
> >> "No volume control GStreamer plugins and/or devices found."
> >>
> >> when I click the icon in the menu bar
> >>
> >> TIA
> >>
> >> J
> >
> > lets try lspci | grep audio  in a terminal first and see what you have
> > for a sound chip
>
> Worryingly, that just returns to the command prompt with no output
> displayed!

Hi John.

Which Ubuntu version. 8.10?

Try, lspci -vn      (just post the soundcard bit)
To see if the soundcard is detected run the following.
cat /proc/asound/cards

If the soundcard is detected, and set as card0, that is a good sign.

Post the output also from the following command.

grep ^Codec /proc/asound/card?/codec*

Ubuntu has Pulseaudio enabled as default, so opening alsamixer in Gnomes 
terminal will just show one slider. To see all controls, open alsamixer as 
below.

alsamixer -D hw:0

I had no problems with sound on my machine that has an hda intel card, and 
Ubuntu/Kubuntu 8.10, but you may find you have to mess with settings in 
alsamixer to get sounds working. The usual sliders that need to be pushed up 
are, Master, PCM, Front, CD. Some controls may be muted (the M key will togle 
the mute/unmute on these controls). External Amplifier, and External Speaker, 
are a couple of controls are worth looking at , if they exist. Changing their 
state can sometimes get sounds working.

Which make/model of Laptop/PC are you using?

Just some suggestions.

Nigel.