THIS penguin has had enough!

I have been a full-time Linux user for several years now, and during that time have had an opportunity to mess around with diverse distros such as Red Hat Linux, Mandrake, Gentoo, Debian, and most recently – Ubuntu (which is based on Debian). I cannot say that my experiences have been wholly positive – there have been many frustrating break-the-keyboard-over-somebody’s-head moments, and finding solutions to seemingly simple problems has not always been easy (the excellent Ubuntu Forums have actually made a world of difference in this regard) – but I somehow managed to get things working anyway.

Nevertheless, I can’t see myself going back to Windows – in comparison to Linux, the amount of keyboard-over-head experiences I’ve dealt with on Windows 3.0 all the way up to Windows Vista have been vastly greater.

How did I do it back then? Damn if I can remember – and this why I really should have kept a journal of my solutions a long time ago. Shortly after researching, diagnosing, and fixing a typical problem I’ve run into with my laptop – a lack of sound – I had a sense of deja-vu, as if I’ve done this before. That’s because I have – twice. So why the hell am I reinventing the wheel every time?

SO, without further ado – a quick and dirty guide to fixing an annoying PulseAudio issue in Ubuntu 9.04, on an HP Pavilion HDX 18 (and possibly other HP machines).

Fixing a Typical Audio Issue:

You’ve got a fresh (or maybe not so fresh) Ubuntu 9.04 install with an audio issue – specifically, sound doesn’t play. You try to play music, videos, even Ubuntu’s test tone. All silent.

And yet, your PC thinks sound is working just fine – all volume meters are up, no errors, nothing is muted, even the Pulse Audio volume meter (run pavumeter) shows that sound is playing.

The command aplay -l gives you perfectly reasonable-looking output:

But there’s a twist to this problem! Try this:

• Plug in a set of headphones and see if you get sound that way! (you should)

Yes, as weird as this is, apparently ALSA seems to have trouble properly routing audio to your speakers.

The answer is to nudge it in the right direction, by specifying a particular directive at the end of the /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf file.

Here is what worked for me:

options snd-hda-intel model=hp-m4 enable_msi=1

Just stick that line at the very end of alsa-base.conf and reboot your machine. You should be good to go!

If you are using a different PC or laptop – experiment with different values for the model parameter, based on the output of aplay – l. You can see a full list of available values for it right here.

And don’t ask me why model=hp-hdx did not work on my HDX. I am still scratching my head about that.

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