Particular audio problems – ASUS-G60VX

English Hardware
1

Hi all,

I just installed Opensuse 11.2 in my new ASUS-G60VX and I’m experiencing two strange problems with the audio card:

  • I can perfectly hear audio coming from the laptop speakers, but when I plug the headphones I have no sound on them. Of course I checked kmix and there is nothing muted or down. Unplugging the headphones gets sound back to the speakers.

  • I cannot use the mic at the side of the webcam to record sound. I would like to configure it in skype, but the only available is the one with plug, on the side of the computer. Kmix here shows only one “capture” control as if the computer has only one configured source-in device. Had no luck with krecord, that only confirms that the capture option in kmix is only for the plug-mic.

IMPORTANT NOTE HERE: I DO see the front-mic volume level and also can HEAR IT through the computer speakers, but I can not set it as record source (capture).

Ok, now what have I tried:

  1. The most important thing, logged out KDE, command mode, sudo-> alsaconf, and got: “Not supported PnP or PCI card found” (!!!) then “No Legacy drivers are available” neither. So I guess this is the hot spot, Suse cannot recognice my sound card correcly! …but how do I have almost perfect sound in my system regardless of the two issues?

  2. Information on my sound card:

After running the script to get all the info, the URL is:

http://www.alsa-project.org/db/?f=7ee1733b6d090e61da261f93ecfb34e6cd852471

Here I can see that the only INPUT device is:


ARECORD

**** List of CAPTURE Hardware Devices ****
card 0: Intel [HDA Intel], device 0: ALC663 Analog [ALC663 Analog]
  Subdevices: 1/1
  Subdevice #0: subdevice #0

But the rest is very confusing for me… help! I know the answer could be in this file.

Information on my video card: The ASUS-G60VX has an NVIDIA GTX 260m video card, and its current driver is: NVIDIA 190.53

As you can see, I cannot see any info on sound coming from an NVIDIA device, that calls my attention.

  1. Another thing I intended to do was to remove and re-install the sound from Yast, but nothing changed. Maybe I should be able to give a name on the board model, but which?! AsusTek? 0X10ec0663 as the Vendor Id?

  2. All this post has been written after trying also to manually update the ALSA drivers, that why you will see in the URL:

!!ALSA Version
!!------------

Driver version:     1.0.22.1-git20100122
Library version:    1.0.21a
Utilities version:  1.0.21

…but that didn’t help neither.

Well, I hope to had posted enough and useful info here. I’m still a newbie and need a hand in many things regarding Suse.

Thanks in advance for the help and the time!
Santasemilla

2

It looks to me like you updated your alsa driver, but then did not also update the remainder of your alsa applications. Aside from installation of the alsa-driver-kmp-default (which it appears you have installed … or did you custom compile ?? ) only update the alsa apps you have already installed.

The repository for these updated alsa apps is here:

http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/multimedia:/libs/openSUSE_11.2/

… if you do not know how to use YaST to update such rpms from a repository other than OSS, post and ask for help on that.

Be certain to reboot after updating to unload the old modules and load the new/updated.

3

Hi Oldcpu,

Thanks for your quick response! Yes, I had updated the alsa driver and the kpm as found in Alsa-update. Thanks for the repo, then I also updated the rest of the applications.

Anyway, the problem is SOLVED, but just because I found the correct model for my soundcard!

options snd-hda-intel model=asus-mode3

at /etc/modprobe.d/50-sound.conf.

Right after posting all my story I found this thread with the same problem with the headphone, then the mic was automatically solved too.

Sorry if this ends as a double post… I was searching so many things this afternoon!

Thanks again for the help!
Santasemilla

4

Well done, and congratulations on solving this! Thankyou for sharing your solution.

5

I forgot to mention … one thing you and/or gpaunescu could do is write a bug report on openSUSE-11.2 and note that in order to get your sound working properly you had to make that edit to the /etc/modprobe.d/50-sound.conf file:

options snd-hda-intel model=asus-mode3

and that the autoconfiguration of alsa did not work.

… and attach to the bug report the text file one gets from running the diagnostic script with the “no-upload” option specified:

/usr/sbin/alsa-info.sh --no-upload

which creates the file /tmp/alsa-info.txt. Just attach that file (attach don’t copy/paste) to the bug report. There is guidance for raising bug reports here: Submitting Bug Reports - openSUSE

Write the bug report against openSUSE-11.2 component “sound”. You can log on to bugzilla with your openSUSE user name and password.

Note its a waste of time to reference this thread, as the openSUSE packager won’t read forum threads, so everything has to be self contained in the bug report.

The alsa sound driver packager for openSUSE is also an alsa developer, and by bringing this to his attention, he is very good at updating alsa and then sending the fixes upstream so that all Linux distributions benefit. Thus hopefully with future Linux versions, this will be automatically configured.