Hi everyone.

My first intro to linux was a live cd of Sabayon Linux a couple of years ago.
Really buggy stuff, and lots of software I needed wouldn't run in Wine, but it was a preconfigured complete noobfriendly distro.

Yesterday I figured I'd go see how Linux has come along and installed Kubuntu 10.10.
Everything works (after a corrupted install due to a file error on the cd which was made at full speed) now, except for the sound.
I'm getting static, and lots of it. If I set the volume of the onboard analog sound to about 50% it's tolerable (just). The sound works, but the static is still there, and when I want to listen to some music or watch a tutorial on Youtube I have to crank up the volume (and thus static) to hear anything.

I've been searching on teh interwebz, but can't even figure out where I can find which sound driver is installed, and how I change it or the config for it.

Could anyone point me in the right direction to get the sound back to the clear quality I was used to on Window$ 7?
(and/or what info you need to point me in the right direction)

Firstly, try muting the Microphone. Second, examine the output of "lspci", and find something similar to the following:

Code: Select all

00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 5 Series/3400 Series Chipset High Definition Audio (rev 06)

Try performing a Google search with the device name from that string and the term "ALSA". Example: "ALSA Intel Corporation 5 series/3400 audio rev 06"

Okay, I've muted every channel one by one (after I removed the PulseAudio server) in ALSAMixerGUI.
This had no effect, other than with the master channel and the front analog channel.

The command "lspci -tv" gave the following info:
Intel Corporation 5 Series/3400 Series Chipset High Definition Audio

I've been digging around for that, and find a lot of people are having issues with it and not getting sound.
My problem isn't getting sound though, but the static. So that isn't much help, or I fail to see the solution amongst all the suggestions provided for their issue.

The thing is though, when I connect my Logitech ClearChat Pro USB headset, Everything is crisp and clear.

This could possibly be an ALSA issue. Have you updated your packages after installing 10.10?

Yes, via the KPackageKit.
The packages that are installed containing the string ALSA are:
Alsamixergui
Alsa-base
Alsa-utils
Bluez-alsa
libsdl1.2debian-alsa

Am I missing something?

Try to run

Code: Select all

cat /proc/asound/version

and report what it returns. It seems like you are running a quite recent version of ALSA though.

I did a quick googling around and found some workarounds that you might want to try:
http://shortrecipes.blogspot.com/2010/1 ... -with.html
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+sour ... bug/266927 (see comments)

It returned the following:
Advanced Linux Sound Architecture Driver Version 1.0.23.

I'll go check those links in the morning. The days don't have enough hours in them since I started getting back into Linux...

Thanks for the quick support

On my system (which has the same card as yours does) the sound is perfectly clear, except when running on AC with low screen brightness set, although loudness isn't an issue.

Since distributions are known to patch ALSA, could you try an openSUSE Live CD to see if it works there?

Okay, second attempt for this post.
I've typed it all before but apparently it wasn't posted.

I had a Suse 11.3 Live CD, so I popped that in. Exactly the same result as in Kubuntu: does play sound, but it has white noise on top of it. So unfortunately no help there, otherwise I could do a cross reference and see what was different.

I've tried removing PulseAudio, to no avail.
I've tried the tip in the first link provided, with models ref and genric.
Since I didn't know exactly which model I should put there, I checked the list of available types for <model> in /usr/share/doc/alsa-base/driver/ALSA-Configuration.txt.gz , in the snd-hda-intel section.
Nothing looked familiar, so i ran the following command:

Code: Select all

cat /proc/asound/card0/codec#* | grep Codec

This resulted in "Codec: Realtek ALC889"

Didn't see that amongst the options.

Found another tip:
$ pulseaudio -k
$ sudo service alsa-utils stop
$ sudo rmmod snd_hda_intel
$ sudo modprobe snd_hda_intel
$ sudo service alsa-utils start
$ pulseaudio -D

Wanted to try that, but since PulseAudio was no longer installed I couldn't do this of course.
Reinstalled PulseAudio, rebooted, and WTF? My ethernet was gone, the entire device failed and was nowhere to be found.
Put my Windows HD back in the rack to see if it was a software/driver issue, but no. No Network adapter found...

It seems I'm having hardware issues as well now, could be totally unrelated though. Unplugging the cable, switching the PSU off with the switch on the back, pressing the powerbutton to remove any residual power from the system and switching everything back on while the cable plugged back in fixed it.
Now both Windows and Linux can get to the Net once more.

Okay, so, PulseAudio reinstalled, but now there is no noise. Downside is: no sound either.
I figured a reboot might do the trick, nope. Checking the channels for muted stuff, nope.
Uninstalled PulseAudio and rebooting gave me sound back but the noise as well.

So I'm stuck again once more.
I'm a real audiophile, so I want to fix this at all cost.

Sadly I can't offer much more help since I don't have much knowledge in this area - except for some small hiccups, sound has always worked well for me on the computers I've configured. It's unfortunate to hear that you got such a bad initial impression of "Linux" (using Linux as a very broad term).

My suggestion is that you try to post it to the Ubuntu forums if you haven't already. Since this most likely isn't an issue with KDE Software, you'll hopefully receive more help there.

This is my second impression, in fact.
The first was Sabayon Linux, but since that was Gentoo based there were some difference.
The sound worked, but the overall user experience wasn't very positive back then.
Still, beryl worked out-of-the-box, and a lot of other stuff.

I'll head over to the Ubuntu forums as well then, didn't realise the base for both is the same but with a different front end.

(If)When I get this sorted out, I'll post the method here for others to read