(ich7 Family) High Definition Audio Controller

Hi,
on my Toshiba Satelite Pro P-100 Laptop runs OpenSuse 10.2. After the installation everything looks fine.
Only the soundcard doesn´t work.

In Yast i find the following informations.:

82801G (ICH7 Family) High Definition Audio Controller
Als Soundkarte Nummer 0 konfiguriert
Treiber snd-hda-intel

informations from hwinfo:

# hwinfo --sound
11: PCI 1b.0: 0403 Audio device
[Created at pci.286]
UDI: /org/freedesktop/Hal/devices/pci_8086_27d8
Unique ID: u1Nb.4+ZJ+hDjta3
SysFS ID: /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1b.0
SysFS BusID: 0000:00:1b.0
Hardware Class: sound
Model: "Toshiba America Info 82801G (ICH7 Family) High Definition Audio Controller"
Vendor: pci 0x8086 "Intel Corporation"
Device: pci 0x27d8 "82801G (ICH7 Family) High Definition Audio Controller"
SubVendor: pci 0x1179 "Toshiba America Info Systems"
SubDevice: pci 0xff31
Revision: 0x02
Driver: "HDA Intel"
Driver Modules: "snd_hda_intel"
Memory Range: 0xd2400000-0xd2403fff (rw,non-prefetchable)
IRQ: 50 (4830 events)
Module Alias: "pci:v00008086d000027D8sv00001179sd0000FF31bc0 4sc0 3i00"
Driver Info #0:
Driver Status: snd_hda_intel is active
Driver Activation Cmd: "modprobe snd_hda_intel"
Config Status: cfg=yes, avail=yes, need=no, active=unknown

Hope that someone can help me.
Thanks

You didn't say whether you heard a sound when configuring the card in Yast, or whether you couldn't play a sound file with a player.

Login and work as root.

Start a mixer (kmix) and verify that the levels are up. Almost all levels shall be at maximum.

In Yast, delete the sound card. Reboot. In Yast, configure the sound card. You shall hear a sound in Yast. Verify that the levels in mixer have not dropped to zero.

Try to play a wav file by more than one player (amarok, play, kaffeine).

These hda sound cards can be a real problem. I have the same 82801g controller on a Lenovo Y400 and it took a while to make it work. The same card on a similar board can be implemented quite differently by different manufacturers so it's something of a lottery whether you will have it work 100% or 0% or somewhere in between, and these ich7 controllers are not fully supported in the Linux kernel yet.

1st thing to do is to open Yast>Security and users and make sure you are assigned to the audio group then reboot and you might have sound. Run alsaconf and alsamixer and make sure the volume is not at zero. You may then need to have the "external" switch enabled in kmix or similar.

If not then chances are you will need to download the latest alsa drivers and compile and install them. You would need the 1.0.14rc3 versions of the driver, libs and utilities. Get them here and follow the install howto for snd-hda-intel here

It's not as complex as it looks at first but you need to be aware that some of the config files used in openSuse are slightly different from a vanilla distro which is what the howto is based on, but it should only take a few minutes to work out what is what, for example the howto mentions editing the file /etc/modules.conf but in openSuse you will need to edit /etc/modprobe.conf.local and so on.

You might also want to search the forums of other distros for solutions specific to Toshiba laptops because if you are incredibly lucky your problem might be solved with the addition of a single line to /etc/modprobe.d/sound and a reboot, i.e "options snd-hda-intel model=xyz" but for Toshiba I don't know what the xyz should be replaced by. If I were you I'd start looking

btw these hd soundcards can be difficult in Windows too. I have a new Lenovo and I tried Windows on it first just to check all the hardware worked. Windows couldn't detect the hardware or install the Lenovo supplied driver. I had to move the relevant files to the right places myself to force Windows to recognise the hardware and it then took a couple of attempts including one crash and spontaneous reboot to get the driver installed. Flaky new hardware and I really don't need 7.1 audio capability or a subwoofer on a laptop, a stereo pair with an old reliable AC97 sound controller would be fine.

i have lenovo y400 also with openSUSE 10.2.

i'm using:
- alsa-driver-1.0.14rc4.tar.bz2
- alsa-lib-1.0.14rc4.tar.bz2
- alsa-utils-1.0.14rc4.tar.bz2

still won't able to hear anything.

the trying:
- alsa-driver-hg20070530.tar.bz2

and i can hear the sound.
but, i can control the volume and mute with onboard button.

why?

btw.
in windows xp, only a few driver from lenovo website is working for this notebook.
i took vga driver from nvidia, bluetooth from broadcomm, audio from realtek, chipset and wireless driver from intel.