Sound MIA When Installed, Nominal Running Live

[dlc]

I have a new Lenovo G500 laptop with EUFI Win8 coexisting with Linux Mint XFCE 15 except that sound doesn't work. It's fine when I boot live from the RC DVD. I have generated diff listings of dmesg and syslog without gaining any insight. The modprobe --showconfig diffs are:

Code: Select all

root@dlc-pl[PN]~/soundbug # cat modprobe.diffs
*** PN.modprobe.log	2013-07-26 11:01:08.000000000 -0400
--- RC.modprobe.log	2013-07-26 15:18:06.000000000 -0400
***************
*** 195,197 ****
  options vmwgfx enable_fbdev=1
- options vt handoff=7
  softdep mlx4_core post: mlx4_en
--- 195,196 ----
root@dlc-pl[PN]~/soundbug # 

alsa-restore fails on the hard drive system. The /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf files are identical, as are the /etc/pulse subtrees. After the installation, I copied over my home subtree from my XFCE 14 system and have applied Mint updates.

I'm short of time to figure this out myself, so any solid help will really be appreciated.

[dlc]

A different approach bears fruit. I reinstalled into a second partition and tested changes until the problem began to manifest. After the updates were applied, sound was still okay. But then service mdm start began terminating with status 2. I had just started loging into a VC and issuing a startxfce4 when that happened originally and thought no more about it since I don't use an xdm daemon anyway. It turns out issuing startx is the key to getting sound to function, and startxfce4 breaks it.

A couple other items, possibly related: (1) Logging out when using startx hangs the system such that only Ctrl-Alt-Del and the magic SysReq key-combos are processed while with startxfce4 it returns to the VC shell prompt as expected, and (2) when booting LMX15 on the Lenovo G500, it reduces screen brightness to the minimum, and it takes a few dozen (plain, no other keys!) F12 presses to bring back up again. If you want F12, you have to press the red Fn key as well, and Ctrl and/or Alt for all Fxx keys and the magic SysReq key--not fun!