After building the new quad core PC, I realized that the sound was not working (at first, I did not pay much attention to sound since this new build is used mainly as a headless node).The motherboard I am using is an ASUS P5QL Pro. At the time of purchase, my primary goal was to choose a cheap yet power efficient board and thus I decided on this P43 ASUS board. Since Intel’s P43 chipset is relatively new, I realized that the hardware support might be some issue (for instance, the onboard gigabit LAN support was just added in Ubuntu 8.10 64 bit).
According to Asus’s documentation, the audio for P5QL Pro is Reltek ALC1200 8-Channel High-Definition Audio. The controller is showing as an Intel 82801JI (ICH10 Family) HD Audio Controller and bares a device ID of 82fe:
But running amixer in console does not yield any sound devices. After searching the Internet, I found this article: basically, adding
options snd-hda-intel probe_mask=1
to /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base. I was able to see the device output from amixer command. And sudo lshw -C sound shows that I have the following:
description: Audio device
product: 82801JI (ICH10 Family) HD Audio Controller
vendor: Intel Corporation
physical id: 1b
bus info: pci@0000:00:1b.0
version: 00
width: 64 bits
clock: 33MHz
capabilities: pm msi pciexpress bus_master cap_list
configuration: driver=HDA Intel latency=0 module=snd_hda_intel
But I still was not able to use the sound control within the Gnome session. The sound icon was shown as disabled and clicking on it resulted in a "no volume control GStreamer plugins and/or devices found" error. After further research, I realized that the user I logged in as does not belong to the group audio (note, this is due to the fact audio was not recognized during installation). So I added the user to the audio group:
usermod -a -G audio <username>
And after that, the audio button became functional.
For whatever reason, the device is showing as HDA Intel ALC 888 in Sound Preferences. And there are many devices to choose from:
It seems that leaving the options as auto detect does not work. I manually set the Sound Events, Music and Movies and Audio Conferencing to use HDA Intel ALC888 Analog (OSS) and set the Default Mixer Tracks to use Realtek ALC888 (OSS Mixer) and everything seemed to finally work.
The ALSA version that comes with Ubuntu 8.10 is 1.0.17a, the source from http://www.alsa-project.org/ does not include patches for 2.6.27-7-generic kernel so I was not able to compile the source. I guess that as an alternative, you can try downloading the latest driver source (right now is 1.0.18a) and it should work in Ubuntu 8.10 (I have compiled it successfully).
Here are some useful links:
