On Sun, Aug 3, 2008 at 2:58 PM, Leo Mauler <webgiant@yahoo.com> wrote:

--- On Mon, 7/28/08, Jon Pruente <jdpruente@gmail.com> wrote:

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On Mon, Jul 28, 2008 at 2:18 PM, Jeffrey Watts <jeffrey.w.watts@gmail.com> wrote:

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What's the chipset? You might want to dig a bit deeper, it's very possible that the chipset is supported, but that auto-detection fails. Back then a lot of those chipsets were very non-standard and you had to manually enter in IRQs and so forth.

I've had a few older systems that defaulted to muted sound, or defaulted to sending the output to some crazy non-exsistant output that didn't exist on the card. They generally just required a quick flip of bits somewhere to get on track. Of course checking dmesg output and alsaconf, etc. will tell you more of what is going on.

Well I guess a litle bit of information goes a long way. I had been thinking that the laptop had some weird very proprietary ESS Audiodrive chipset, ESS0006, which is what popped up in the Ubuntu Device Manager.

Recently I discovered that his laptop actually uses the ESS1869 chipset, which is supported by the snd-es18xx module. Turns out one line ("snd-es18xx") added to /etc/modules made his sound work in Ubuntu Linux. Funny thing was that he didn't know he had a built-in microphone on his laptop until Ubuntu rebooted and the speakers started echoing everything we said...

Turns out that Ubuntu likes to disable some systems' sound by default, though I've never found the criteria they use to determine which systems shouldn't have sound and which get get sound. This link describes the problem and how to fix it, if any of you run into someone having the same problem and can't fix it personally.

Linux - Installing Ubuntu - Enabling your sound card...

http://www.aotk50.dsl.pipex.com/install-ubuntu-sb16/install-ubuntu-sb16.htm

TinyURL: http://tinyurl.com/2kp9so

Anyway, now that his sound works I think I've hooked another Linux convert. WINE already ran the few bits of Windows software he has to run.

Thank you for the update; I'm glad to know Ubuntu works for you now. Ubuntu is a community driven distribution. Canonical might put gas in the tank, but the wheels and engine are people like you, me and your friend. I encourage you or your friend to file a bug in Launchpad about this so it can be tracked and fixed for everybody. If you need help, just come into #ubuntu-bugs on Freenode and we'll sort you out. Justin Dugger Ubuntu Member