SOLVED - Mint 13, HP Pavilion G6 no sound

[Camel]

Hi,

I've just installed Mint 13 on my new Pavilion G6 and it's not making any noise at all. I installed all the upgrades and that hasn't fixed it. Audio software (VLC, MPlayer ect) hangs when I try to play music, firefox hangs when I play a video online and there is no login chime or anything. I've also noticed when I go Menu->Preferences->Appearance, I get a message saying

Unable to start the settings manager 'mate-settings-daemon'.
Without the MATE settings manager running, some preferences may not take effect. This could indicate a problem with DBus, or a non-MATE (e.g. KDE) settings manager may already be active and conflicting with the MATE settings manager.

Does anyone have any suggestions??

Thanks

[LightWaveX]

Try installing the ALSA mixer and set it up.

Code: Select all

sudo apt-get install gnome-alsamixer

[jim7634]

This is a repeat post from another thread.

I had the same problem for a couple of years ago (2+) on my HP dv7 AMD64.

This problem has presisted through openSuSE, Ubuntu and now Mint 13. However, a kind soul on the openSuSE forum finally gave me the answer and I pass it on to you.

Simply copy this code into a file called 50-sound.conf and put it in /etc/modprobe.d. reboot and WAHLA -- SOUND! No drivers to load that weren't loaded during the initial install.

One problem I did find, If you did load the driver, as suggested in the post above there seems to be a conflict. Be careful.

Code: Select all

options snd-hda-intel model=hp-dv6 enable_msi=1
options snd slots=snd-hda-intel,snd-hda-intel
# 5Dex.54Z4e7pBsC8:SBx00 Azalia (Intel HDA)
alias snd-card-0 snd-hda-intel_msi
# l4dC.5MBuk33R4dE:ATI Technologies Inc
alias snd-card-1 snd-hda-intel
~

Jim Lees

[Camel]

Thanks for the replies!

I tried saving that file into /etc/modprobe.d but unfortunately it hasn't made a difference. I'm thinking perhaps that's because model=hp-dv6 isn't the right option for my laptop. I'm currently going through this list
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1043568
to see if I can find something that works for me.

Also, I can't run gnome-alsamixer because it freezes when it runs. Running plain old alsamixer works though and I can see I have two sound cards. The first and default one is an ATI R6xx HDMI and I get the message 'This sound device does not have any controls'. The second card appears normal in alsamixer but I can't figure out how to get alsa to use that card. Any suggestions?

[LightWaveX]

Well, if you do not require both sound cards, disable one of them in the BIOS.

[Camel]

Finally solved it. I had to download and build the latest stable version of ALSA (currently 1.0.25) and for some magic reason I've now got sound, music and beeps just like it should. Simple.

[RanTalbott]

I also tried many posted solutions (including removing pulseaudio, which didn't help and might not have been necessary).

The Pavilion g6 BIOS won't let you disable the HDMI output (listed as "ATI Device 9902" in lspci output). So the trick (found by someone else: my apologies for not bookmarking the page so I can give proper credit) is to tell alsa to default to the other one.

Edit /usr/share/alsa/alsa.conf and replace all occurrences of "card 0" with "card 1" (note the space between "card" and the digit). There were 5 of these in my alsa.conf. This changes several "default.blahblah" parameters to use the second sound device. You might not need to reboot, but doing so was faster than researching whether it's avoidable

My guess is that your re-installation of alsa produced a different alsa.conf from the one that came with Mint 13.

Note: I have checked whether this messes with other features because all I cared about was getting system sounds.