Headphones with Ubuntu 9.04 and Gateway T-6345u

Ubuntu seemed to work perfectly on the Gateway T-6345u laptop model…until I plugged my headphones in and found that no sound was coming out of them. I tried a second pair and could make sure there was nothing wrong with the headphones. When I plugged them in while something was playing, I noticed that there was some sound for a very brief split-second. I could reproduce this effect with both headphones and began to wonder if this could be a software issue.

So I looked around and quickly found discussions about the same or similar symptoms occurring on several releases of Ubuntu, from 8.x up to the 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope release I am using on this laptop. Some suggested to kill PulseAudio, but this didn’t help at all. It was most likely related to ALSA, the Advanced Linux Sound Architecture drivers.

I found this thread in the Ubuntu forums revolving around pretty much the same problem I experienced. The solution sounded pretty simple:

head -n 1 /proc/asound/card0/codec*
or
less /proc/asound/card0/codec#0

to find out what soundcard or chipset I’m using. For this Gateway model I got "Codec: SigmaTel STAC9205".

zless /usr/share/doc/alsa-base/driver/ALSA-Configuration.txt.gz

and looked for the section for "Module snd-hda-intel". In this section I was supposed to find STAC9205. I found the following models:

• ref Reference board
• dell-m42 Dell (unknown)
• dell-m43 Dell Precision
• dell-m44 Dell Inspiron

sudo nano /ect/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf

Next I had to configure alsa to use the right model. None of the entries I found fit, but I started with “ref”, and added the following line:

options snd-hda-intel model=ref

I restarted, but nothing changed for me. I tried dell-m42, m43, m44 and even other (Gateway related) models I found in other sections. Sometimes I would get a headphone slider and/or checkbox in the volume control dialog, sometimes not, sometimes I would get no sound at all, and I never managed to get a beep out of my headphones.

I tried to follow some other leads I found in the Ubuntu forums, installed tools, helpers, and libraries, but none of them made a difference. Ultimately, everything led back to alsa.

I downloaded and installed the latest alsa-driver:

sudo apt-get install alsaconf
sudo apt-get install alsa-base alsa-utils
sudo apt-get install build-essential linux-headers-$(uname -r)
wget ftp://ftp.alsa-project.org/pub/driver/alsa-driver-1.0.20.tar.bz2
tar -xjf alsa-driver-1.0.20.tar.bz2
cd alsa-driver-1.0.20
./configure
sudo make
sudo make install

This didn’t seem to make much of a difference, so I looked around and tried a script I found here to download and install the latest snapshot. Again, this first didn’t seem to make much of a difference. Until I looked at the following list of models:

gedit /usr/src/Alsa-1.0.20/alsa-driver-1.0.20/alsa-kernel/Documentation/HD-Audio-Models.txt

This file reveals the following list of models for STAC9205/9254:

• ref Reference board
• dell-m42 Dell (unknown)
• dell-m43 Dell Precision
• dell-m44 Dell Inspiron
• eapd Keep EAPD on (e.g. Gateway T1616)
• auto BIOS setup (default)

Compared to the previous version that shipped with Ubuntu, there are two new entries, eapd and auto now. The eapd (external amplifier power down) option looks quite promising, so back to…

sudo nano /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf

and added the following line:

options snd-hda-intel model=eapd probe_mask=1 position_fix=1

Restart and success! The headphones finally work properly. If you were having similar problems and found this blog in the attempt to find a solution, I hope these steps could help you a bit further in your quest. I can imagine that other headphone issues could perhaps be solved as well, with an alsa-upgrade and adjustments to alsa-base.conf.