SUSE 11 Dell Inspiron 9300 Sound Issues

Let me preface this by stating that I am EXTREMELY new to Linux.
I have a Dell Inspiron 9300, upon which I have installed Open SUSE 11. The laptop has the onboard AC97 (Intel) sound card.

This was previously a dual boot WinXP / SUSE 10.3 machine. The HCL ( HCL/Laptops/Dell - openSUSE ) shows my laptop should work fine for 10.3.

I replaced the 10.3 with 11, and everything (including sound) worked fine. After doing some other testing, I decided to “go for it”.

I wiped the machine, and did a fresh install of SUSE 11 only. (No more dual boot). Everything so far is working perfectly, except I have no sound.

I checked Yast | Sound Configuration, and it shows as:
82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Family) AC’97 Audio Controller

There are 4 “settings”, descibed as:
AC’97 codec clock
AC’97 workaround for strange hardware.
Enable work-around for buggy interrupts on some motherboards.
Enable work-around for hardware with problematic code semaphores.

At this point, I am completely lost.
All of the settings have numeric value options, but I don’t know what the numbers represent. None of the settings have values set (which is what I’m guessing is the problem here -but to be totally honest, I’m grasping at straws).

Does anybody have some suggestions or (hopefully) a solution for me?

Thanks in advance,

Have a go at the troubleshooting steps in SDB:AudioTroubleshooting - openSUSE. Let us know if you’re not sure about any of them.

Hi, I just got back off of vacation and I am going through the various sound threads to see if I can help at all.

If nzlbob23’s excellent suggestion does not help you, then please provide us more information. Please start by copy and pasting the following diagnostic script into a gnome-terminal / konsole with your PC connected to the internet:

wget http://home.cfl.rr.com/infofiles/tsalsa && su -c 'bash ./tsalsa' 

and when prompted for a password enter your root password. Please try to accurately estimate the number of jacks/plug you have when asked (for example, I have 3 i/o sound jacks on my PC), and when the script is complete it will give you a URL. Please post that URL on this thread.

Also, in addition to the above, please copy and paste the following commands one line at a time into a gnome-terminal / konsole and paste here the output of these commands:
rpm -qa | grep alsa
rpm -qa | grep pulse
rpm -q libasound2
uname -a
cat /etc/modprobe.d/sound

Easy way

Try adding this repository in Yast.

Index of /repositories/multimedia:/audio/openSUSE_11.0

In the Software Manager (if using gnome desktop) click upgrades and type “alsa” into the filters box. Select all the available updates and click install and then apply. Restart once all the packages have been installed.

More Difficult Way

I cannot confirm that the above method will work, however I did get the sound working on a Dell Inspiron 9300 by compiling the alsa 1.7 packages from the alsa homepage ( Main Page - AlsaProject ).

Good Luck!

This is a correction of the previous post.

Easy way

Try adding this repository in Yast.

Index of /repositories/multimedia:/audio/openSUSE_11.0

In the Software Manager (if using gnome desktop) click upgrades and type “alsa” into the filters box. Select all the available updates and click install and then apply. Restart once all the packages have been installed.

More Difficult Way

I cannot confirm that the above method will work, however I did get the sound working on a Dell Inspiron 9300 by compiling the alsa 1.0.17 packages from the alsa homepage ( Main Page - AlsaProject ).

Good Luck!