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Headphone problem with Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty Fawn)

I was having a sporadic problem with my headphone jack in my new Dell E1505 laptop that came pre-loaded with Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty Fawn), using ALSA. The problem was that when I plugged in my headphones, sometimes they worked, and other times nothing happened. No sound from my headphones at all.

Here is how I fixed the sound in my Dell laptop…

Here are the specs on the hardware: (Dell Inspiron E1505n)

$ lspci | grep -i audio
00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) High Definition Audio Controller (rev 01)

$ cat /proc/asound/cards
 0 [Intel          ]: HDA-Intel - HDA Intel
                      HDA Intel at 0xefffc000 irq 11

$ dpkg -l 'alsa*'
Desired=Unknown/Install/Remove/Purge/Hold
| Status=Not/Installed/Config-files/Unpacked/Failed-config/Half-installed
|/ Err?=(none)/Hold/Reinst-required/X=both-problems (Status,Err: uppercase=bad)
||/ Name           Version        Description
+++-==============-==============-============================================
un  alsa                    (no description available)
ii  alsa-base      1.0.13-3ubuntu ALSA driver configuration files
un  alsa-oss                (no description available)
ii  alsa-utils     1.0.13-1ubuntu ALSA utilities

Here is the file I opened and edited to fix it:

$ sudo vi /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base

I added this line at the end:

options snd-hda-intel model=ref

This seemed to have fixed my problem, however your system may have a different model.

Here is how to find out what model you have.

  1. You need a list of the models that Alsa supports, so we download the Alsa Driver from the Alsa project (I used version 1.0.14) So you can see the list of models to choose from. (There may be a list on the net somewhere that makes this download worthless, but I couldn’t find it.)
  2. Extract the drivers to a temporary directory
  3. Find out what model your system has 
    $ cat /proc/asound/card0/codec\#*

    You can usually figure out what your model is at the top of the output.

  4. Now in extracted file you need to open “./alsa-kernel/Documentation/ALSA-Configuration.txt” and scroll down until you get to the list of models. Find the one that matches yours and you know what to use.

Good luck fixing yours.

My sources that led to my fixes:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/HdaIntelSoundHowto
http://ubuntuguide.org/wiki/Ubuntu:Feisty#Sound

Adam

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