Hi all,
I have an HP Compaq Presario B1800 laptop (Pentium M, 2GHz, 500MB ram) that originally had windows XP on it. Windows was running really slow, so I decided to give linux a try. I originally installed Linux Mint (v10, because I can only do CD Rom boot), but it would not play any video (just black screen on the video overlay). I then installed Lubuntu (v17), and it managed to play youtube videos, but no sound! I then installed the latest AntiX (v16.2), and same thing. it plays youtube videos, but no sound! It looks like this is a common problem with ubuntu-based distros, but I haven't found a consensus on the fix. Please help! -I'm a bit new at this, so please let me know all detailed steps if you want me to try anything.

I tried the headphone jack - no sound.  I've done the

sudo apt-get update

and then rebooted, but it did not solve sound issue. I've tried toggling and playing around with the alsa mixer, turning up all the sound output channels, but that did not help.

Here is some info on my sound card:
Multimedia Controller: Intel 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW ICH6 AC'97 rev 04 Audio Controller driver: snd_intel8x0
Chip: Realtek ALC250 rev 2
Sound: Advanced Linux Sound Architecture v: k4.4.10-antix.l-486-smp

Here's a couple of things I can think of to check.

Try F6 in alsamixer to see if it's using the sound card you think it should be.
Check to see that all sound modules are being loaded (lsmod).
Check the sound source in your audio/video program.

I've checked those things, but the sound is still not coming.  I'm thinking it's a hardware issue.  I might end up just using this laptop as something to experiment with linux, and not as a music server as I originally wanted.  I posted this same issue in another forum, so you can see all the things I tried:


========= SCRAPER REMOVED AN EMBEDDED LINK HERE ===========
url was:"https://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/showthread.php?p=5761128&posted=1#post5761128"
linktext was:"https://www.linuxquestions.org/question ... ost5761128"
====================================


Thanks for responding...

I see you finally came to the source Luke. Howdy and Welcome.

lol!

<shot in the dark>
# alsactl init
#reboot

The Debian wiki suggests downloading source code for presumably
========= SCRAPER REMOVED AN EMBEDDED LINK HERE ===========
url was:"http://www.realtek.com.tw/downloads/downloadsCheck.aspx?Langid=1&PNid=14&PFid=24&Level=4&Conn=3&DownTypeID=3&GetDown=false"
linktext was:"proprietary Realtek drivers"
====================================
and then building and installing them.  It is a slightly non-trivial process and the drivers need to be built for the specific kernel you are running.    I tried doing it here but there were compile issues addressed here
========= SCRAPER REMOVED AN EMBEDDED LINK HERE ===========
url was:"https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/309376/do-posix-clock-monotonic-gettime-is-missing-in-linux-time-h"
linktext was:"do_posix_clock_monotonic_gettime is missing in linux/time.h"
====================================
.  I fixed those two issues and then hit another regarding hrtimer_get_res() which was removed from the kernel in 2015.  Patches for two of the files are available here
========= SCRAPER REMOVED AN EMBEDDED LINK HERE ===========
url was:"https://patchwork.kernel.org/patch/6217971/"
linktext was:"sound: Use hrtimer_resolution instead of hrtimer_get_res()"
====================================
but I decided to stop.

Since we try to cater to older hardware it might be worthwhile to try to pursue this further.    Some of the source code is GPLed but some of it isn't so I don't know what the legality is of distributing drivers built this way or even distributing patched source code.  Since it needs to be downloaded from RealTek, I presume it contains a mixture of proprietary and Free software.  If it were all Free (and compatible with GPLv2) and if it contains a solution then it should have already been incorporated into the kernel.

[tapatalk is insists on adding newlines before my urls. I don't know why]