New UPDATE: Built-in sound *not* working well (was UPDATE: Built-in sound now working fine)

[Leo Mauler]

Sorry, I spoke too soon on this one.  While the microphone plays through to the speakers just fine, when audio or video files are played there is nothing but static, though it is bursts of static indicating something is trying to render the digital media into analog sound.  The microphone also stays on all the time and has to be manually switched off.

We've tried different players (the built-in media player, VLC, the music player) and different sound formats (wav, mp3, ogg, avi (XviD/MP3 and XviD/Ogg), mpeg1, etc.) and none of them produce anything other than bursts of static.

--- On Sun, 8/3/08, Leo Mauler <webgiant at yahoo.com> wrote:

> 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.