No sound Samsung laptop SOLVED

[Catchpole]

I have put Mint Mate 18 Sarah on a Samsung NP3530EC (Intel Core i3)

There is no sound from the speakers but the head phones work OK.
I can't find a solution on the Internet.
I've tried "sudo alsa force-reload" and tried different settings in the "Sound Preferences" but to no avail.

Sound card = 7 series/c210 (rev 04)

Has anyone got any ideas?

[Joe2Shoe]

I would install PulseAudio via the Software Manager.
Search for "pavucontrol"

Good luck.

[jimallyn]

I would install PulseAudio via the Software Manager.

I second the motion. That has fixed a lot of sound problems. One thing that may be a bit confusing is that sound sources don't show up in the list of things you can adjust until they're actually playing something. If you want to adjust the sound of a video playing in your browser, start playing the video, and then look for it in PulseAudio Volume Control.

[Catchpole]

Hi jimallyn, joe2shoe,

I already have PulseAudio installed. It came with the Mint 18 package.

I've checked everything in the sound preferences but all seems to be in order.
There's some input activity when something is playing in the web browser and both the input and output volumes are set to 100%.
The sound icon in the system try is not muted.

Its very frustrating when the headphones work but the speakers will not.

EDIT.
In the volume control, there is a window to select the "Port" either headphones or speakers.
When selecting "Speakers" it says "Speakers (unavailable)"

So it seems that the sound card is working fine because the headphones work.

A search on the internet confirms that there are indeed speakers fitted but they are unavailable. Why, I don't know.
https://www.pcworldbusiness.co.uk/catal ... 376W#tabss

[Joe2Shoe]

Could be a bad headphone jack. But, if it plays in Windows, and speakers & jack work, then the jack is fine, and it's a LM issue.

[jimallyn]

I already have PulseAudio installed.

Yes, but do you have PulseAudio Volume Control? I thought about correcting Joe2Shoe when he said PulseAudio, knowing that pavucontrol installs the PulseAudio Volume Control. PulseAudio is the sound system, PulseAudio Volume Control is the application that controls volumes in PulseAudio. I think that all versions of Mint come with PulseAudio installed, but not all of them come with PulseAudio Volume Control installed.

[Catchpole]

Hi jimallyn,

Yes I've got the latest version of pavucontrol pre-installed.
I installed Mint over Windows so I can't check if the speakers worked with before.
I'll try some other live distro's to see if they configure the speakers and then come back with an EDIT.

EDIT.
When I plug the headphones in, the "Output" box in the volume control changes from "Speakers" to "Headphones" and back again to "Speakers" when I take it unplug it.
So I suspect that the Stereo "Jack" is working properly.

EDIT.
I have tried six different distro's:
Puppy
Peppermint
Fat Dog
Zorin
Linux Lite
Lubuntu

None of them were able to play sound from the Internet.
My conclusion is that there is a fault with the computer and I'm not willing to strip it down to fix the fault.
I don't want to reinstall Windows to add further proof.
So I guess I should mark it as solved.