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Fix the not working/very low sound in Ubuntu

After installing Ubuntu 8.10 on my Asus M50Vn, I ran into a problem I had already seen some years ago in Fedora (by the time it was still called “Fedora Core”, probably version 2 or 3): the sound was *very* low. I mean so low that to hear a little something I had to set all stuff (alsa mixer + VLC + the speakers themselves) to max. Also so low that at first I though it was just not working…

After a few months of lazy searching, I finally found a fix thanks to ubuntuforums.org: you need to upgrade alsa. Ok, this I already knew, but even though I kept installing always the latest updates, the sound was still not working. Well, the fact is that, as usual, the official Ubuntu packages are lots of months late… Hopefully someone posted an update script for alsa on ubuntuforums, and this worked fine for me.

1. back up your valuable data
2. grab the compressed script called sth like “AlsaUpgrade-1.0.x-rev-1.15.tar” on this page
3. unpack it
4. run it as root with the -di option: this will download quite a lot of stuff, compile it and install it. The whole process took around 5 minutes for me on a 30Mbps connection and Core 2 Duo P8600.
5. reboot your laptop

For more details, refer to the forum post in the link I provided.

Sources:
Ubuntu and ASUS M50 version notebooks
Alsa 1.0.18 Installation Script

Posted in Asus M50Vn, Linux.


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