Sound With Ubuntu 7.10 On A Dell Latitude D830
I managed to get sound working using Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy beta) on my Dell Latitude D830 a few weeks ago but hadn’t documented it. I didn’t document it because I basically hacked out a solution that involved compiling a kernel of my own and including the Intel HDA driver in the kernel (rather than as a module like it is by default). This also meant that wireless and such didn’t work which was actually okay because during the day I wanted sound to listen to music but at night at home, I didn’t need sound but required wireless. So essentially i had a big hack that involved me choosing the right kernel to boot from at startup. Not an ideal solution.
But I see now from this bug report that the problem was indeed with the ALSA driver and it’s now been fixed upstream. Unfortunately there’s no update to the Ubuntu packages as of yet but at least now there is a fix that is much less of a hack.
First, grab the latest snapshot source from the ALSA site and extract the file. I grabbed the August 21, 2007 snapshot.
% wget ftp://ftp.suse.com/pub/projects/alsa/snapshot/driver/alsa-driver-hg20070821.tar.bz2 % tar xvpjf alsa-driver-hg20070821.tar.bz2
Then change into the new directory, configure the build and install the driver files. It is important to note that until this is fixed, you will likely have to do this everytime the Ubuntu kernel is updated.
./configure --with-cards=hda-intel make sudo make install
After the drivers are installed, reboot and sound will now magically work.
