Hi Luke,

I have read somewhere on Ubuntu support forums that Kubuntu had indeed a lot less problems with sound than Gutsy + Gnome. And yes, unfortunately, my work PC has been updated many times (before going to Gutsy). But we did a nice clean up (reinstalling all kinds of dependencies) some weeks ago to make sure that this was not the issue.

By the way, some of our Linux specialists here (we have a nice and friendly development team) did put some efforts into it too, but they couldn’t do much for me. I don’t blame them though, it is not their job to offer Linux support to a guy like me (a non-IT professional, I mean).

@Jake – ndiswrapper has improved greatly in the last year or so. When I first installed it, WEP was not supported for my card. Now it works without any major issues.

@Alphast – It could be that Kubuntu ships with a slightly different set of libs which somehow perhaps play nicer with ALSA. It’s probably not the case but that is the only thing I could think off.

Btw, did you upgrade to Gutsy or did you do a clean install? If you upgraded then it’s possible that some odd dependency glitch based on your former configuration is holding you back.

I remember dealing with stuff like that when I upgraded my box from Hoary to Dapper. When I booted Dapper off the live CD everything would work. When I booted the upgraded dapper some things were broken. It was nothing that couldn’t be fixed but shit like that happens sometimes.

I guess I am just cursed, then… :-( But also, I don’t use KDE at all, only Gnome (so no Krecord).

I’ve had equally spectacular results with my Dell Inspiron 1501. The one thing is that I get slightly better reception for when I’m on the go with the ndiswrapper drivers… better than under Windows XP itself. That one, I’ve yet to figure out. The native drivers work just as well as the Windows drivers under Windows though.

Interesting… I just tried Youtube and for shits and giggles installed the Gnash plugin instead of Adobe flash. Then I was prompted to load few assorted Codecs and plugins and sound worked just fine. Animation was bit choppy but I guess that’s Gnash for you.

Sound recording also works. I installed Krecord and recorded a short clip of me tapping on the laptop case and was able to play it back immediately.

I do have the AC’97 Audio Controller in this machine but for some reason I’m not experiencing any trouble you are mentioning. Weird!

By the way, in the message above, I meant record, not register. Me and my English… :-(

Hi Luke,

I am glad to see that you had no trouble at all. To be honest, on two other configurations (at home) I have no problem with the sound under Gutsy. But they are not Intel chipsets.

But at work, with this chipset:
82801DB/DBL/DBM (ICH4/ICH4-L/ICH4-M) AC’97 Audio Controller

it simply doesn’t work properly. As far as i understood by reading the various forums on this topic, I have to wait for ALSA 0.15 to be integrated into Ubuntu next distribution. But ALSA 1.0.14-1 (which I obviously have) won’t work. My system does tell me that I have this chipset and that ALSA is being used as driver. I actually get sound from Rythmbox (for instance) or from the test of the Sound panel of Gnome. But if I try to get sound from a streaming site (YouTube, etc.) it is just silent. If I try to register sound (for an office use with Skype, for instance, or by testing the microphone in the Sound panel) I get the dreaded message:

gconfaudiosrc ! audioconvert ! audioresample ! gconfaudiosink profile=chat: Resource busy or not available.

I will wait patiently for ALSA 1.0.15 to be integrated into Ubuntu (Hardy, I guess), but I am not a happy Gutsy customer, as you can imagine. And this despite the fact that I love this distribution for pretty much everything else.