UPDATE: Built-in sound now working fine (was Re: Linux-compatible Laptop add-on sound cards?)

[Leo Mauler]

--- On Mon, 7/28/08, Jon Pruente <jdpruente at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Mon, Jul 28, 2008 at 2:18 PM, Jeffrey Watts
> <jeffrey.w.watts at gmail.com> wrote:
> > What's the chipset?   You might want to dig a bit
> > deeper, it's very possible that the chipset is 
> > supported, but that auto-detection fails.  Back 
> > then a lot of those chipsets were very non-standard 
> > and you had to manually enter in IRQs and so forth.
> 
> I've had a few older systems that defaulted to muted
> sound, or defaulted to sending the output to some 
> crazy non-exsistant output that didn't exist on the 
> card.  They generally just required a quick flip of 
> bits somewhere to get on track.  Of course checking
> dmesg output and alsaconf, etc. will tell you more 
> of what is going on.

Well I guess a litle bit of information goes a long way.  I had been thinking that the laptop had some weird very proprietary ESS Audiodrive chipset, ESS0006, which is what popped up in the Ubuntu Device Manager.

Recently I discovered that his laptop actually uses the ESS1869 chipset, which is supported by the snd-es18xx module.  Turns out one line ("snd-es18xx") added to /etc/modules made his sound work in Ubuntu Linux.  Funny thing was that he didn't know he had a built-in microphone on his laptop until Ubuntu rebooted and the speakers started echoing everything we said...

Turns out that Ubuntu likes to disable some systems' sound by default, though I've never found the criteria they use to determine which systems shouldn't have sound and which get get sound.  This link describes the problem and how to fix it, if any of you run into someone having the same problem and can't fix it personally.

Linux - Installing Ubuntu - Enabling your sound card...

http://www.aotk50.dsl.pipex.com/install-ubuntu-sb16/install-ubuntu-sb16.htm

TinyURL: http://tinyurl.com/2kp9so

Anyway, now that his sound works I think I've hooked another Linux convert.   WINE already ran the few bits of Windows software he has to run.