Fixing No Sound Bug on Dell Inspiron 1520 in Ubuntu Gutsy
Though it’s been a while since Gutsy was released, I couldn’t try out for various reasons. But finally I got my hands on Gutsy DVD edition, and I sat about installing it on my Dell Inspiron. I noticed first signs of trouble when Gutsy was taking unsually long to boot up. Switching to verbose mode, I knew something wrong when I saw
hda_intel: azx_get_response timeout
Initially I thought it was a problem with the live environment, however when install was done, my fears were confirmed. Indeed, Ubuntu wasn’t able to play any sound. This was a bit surprising since openSUSE 10.3 detected all of my hardware flawlessly(even more weirder was that Kubuntu Feisty had no problems with the sound!)
A bit of Googling and I found there are few solutions to this problem, which is because of ALSA. Apparently version lower than 1.0.15 has bugs and problems especially with Intel HDA codecs. So let’s see some solutions:
Solution 1:
The most common solotion given was to open up terminal and type
sudo apt-get install module-assistant
sudo m-a update
sudo m-a prepare
sudo m-a a-i alsa
However I couldn’t try this, since I didnt have an active net connection.
Solution 2:
Another solution is to obtain ALSA-1.0.15 and compile it from sources, as indicated below
sudo apt-get install libc6-dev
sudo apt-get install patch
w get ftp : // ftp.alsa-project.org/pub/driver/alsa-driver-1.0.15.tar.bz2 (remove the spaces after ftp and the colon, and in between w and get)
tar xvpjf alsa-driver-1.0.15.tar.bz2
cd alsa-driver-1.0.15
./configure --with-cards=hda-intel,emu10k1
make
sudo make install
Again, lack of an active internet connection prevented me from testing this out. Then I came across solution 3, which was easiest of the lot.
Solution 3:
Here, open the terminal and type
sudo apt-get install linux-backports-modules-generic
This works great! If you want to obtain the packages from the DVD use aptitude instead of apt-get, ie
sudo aptitude install linux-backports-modules-generic
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Comments
i also had this problem just a couple of days ago. easy way around this would be to unplug the power cable while starting ubuntu. its a problem with the ACPI. unbelievable but it works! check out on the ubuntu forums http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=647499
@Kaneida: Well that’s a unique solution! I’d gone Googling for the solution and this(the ones I’ve posted) was the most common one! Anyways thanks for sharing, might come in handy to others
Very minor — but add a hyphen to your –with-cards parameter. I envy minds like this. Great post; thanks!
@Kyle: Thanks for the comments 
Could you be specific about what changes I’m supposed to do? More specifIcally to this line: –-with-cards=hda-intel,emu10k1
The post does contain the extra hyphen, though it’s not clearly visible.
Huh.
Here’s my copy-n-paste of the green command line text:
./configure –with-cards=hda-intel,emu10k1
only one hyphen before “with” Is your blogging software stripping it out?
@Kyle. Hmm Weird. While editing the post it shows 2 hypens. Prolly the formatting is causing something. I’ll put them under the code tag. Thanks for letting me know. Much appreciated
[...] had a pretty bad time with Gutsy - no sound despite the sound card being detected, LCD brightness varying as if its possessed etc - these [...]
Solution 1 worked well for me.- I think U need to also explicitly specify that u need to restart the system after that.
And yes, I asked U that day, over a month ago and am booting into Ubuntu only now.
But when I now am in an incresingly possible state to shift over to Linux, I get inspired towards OpenSuse than Ubuntu.
[...] with Ubuntu has problems with Intel’s HDA codec. Turning to my Google I was able to find a solution to the problem. Never expected Ubuntu to have a problem with a common hardware(though in all fairness, it’s [...]