Ubuntu 9.10 has no audio

[wyntarvox]

Last weekend I set up dual-boot Windows XP and Ubuntu 9.10 on my desktop. Everything went fine and I'm really liking Ubuntu so far. (A few years ago I dual-booted a desktop with Windows XP and Debian also, so I'm not completely new to this process.)

However, the only problem I'm having is that I have no audio in Ubuntu. It works fine in XP, both before I installed Ubuntu and now when I boot to XP with both installed. I had a look around Google and found a few people with similar problems, but none of the suggestions seemed to help.

I have two sound cards, one built-in and one additional. I originally bought the additional because I could never get the built-in card to work in XP. I had the built-in card disabled in the BIOS, and Ubuntu (with aplay -l) was only showing the additional card, as expected. I enabled the built-in card and Ubuntu picked it up, but setting the audio to use that card still had no effect.

The additional card is a Creative EV1938 (so it's fairly old).

I've run alsamixer for both cards and made sure all of the settings are at 100% but still no love.

Anyone have any suggestions?

Comments

[kareila]

I don't have any suggestions, but I feel your pain!

When I was at Atlanta Linux Fest a couple of months ago, I asked one of the Ubuntu audio devs, "Why is this such a hard problem?" He said it came down to sound card vendors not agreeing on a standard way to create drivers; every different sound card requires some degree of reverse engineering.

Good luck!

[siliconshaman]

have you tried it under OSS ? I had a similar problem under 9.04, and while I never did manage to resolve it [something in gstreamer was screwing the sound system] OSS would work even when ALSA didn't.

Alternatively, you could try a reinstall, and be careful not to mix Gnome and KDE elements as that also mucks it up. [also, do not install&run rhythmbox...that's known to cause problems for 9.10.]

[allen]

Wow. There are a lot of people out there having problems with the EV1938 under Linux. You _might_ be better off trying the onboard sound, depending on what chipset it has.

Otherwise, does sound act like it should play, but just no sound comes out? Or if you try to play something (using, mplayer, for instance), does it hang and/or proceed very slowly? When you start trying to play a sound, do you get any messages in /var/log/syslog?

Oh, and because I've done this plenty of times: when you go into alsamixer and set everything to 100%, you are also unmuting all of the channels, right?

(Looks around...) There's also the Sound Preferences panel that you can get to by right-clicking on the volume icon in your notification panel. Worth looking around there and making sure that everything is correct--I think that once I had some card default to headphones-out rather than the normal output jack.

[baggyeyes]

I remember this. If I recall correctly, Pulse Audio was screwing up, and the only way I could get my sound card to work, (because there was a driver for it) was to disable Pulse Audio, kill the Pulse Audio server, and reboot. Alsa correctly identified my card, and it loaded on reboot.

[draigwen]

Ditto. I think I had to get uninstall and then reinstall PulseAudio a while back to get sound working.