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Old HP Laptop: No Audio after Updates
Recently I have seen a lot of posts on the Internet about Laptop Sound suddenly not working on Ubuntu 12.04 systems after the Updates have been done. I experienced this when trying to load an old HP P4 laptop. (Model ze5715) Below is a summary of what happened, and how I was able to finally to get this Laptop loaded using Mint 13 Xfce:
- The sound worked when first loaded using Ubuntu 12.04. After the Updates the sound no longer worked, and the sound controls show a “dummy output” device.
- Booting to the previous version worked, showing a “headphone” audio device … and then it stopped working showing the “dummy output” device.
- Mint 13 Xfce also worked when first loaded, showing “ALI 5451 (Alsa mixer)” as the selected sound card. After doing the updates, a PulseAudio dummy output sound device was shown.
Going on a guess, I reloaded this laptop with Mint 13 Xfce, and then immediately did a complete uninstall of PulseAudio. Since use of the ALSA sound system is already well integrated into Mint 13, there was no need to install anything to still have a volume control to use once PulseAudio was uninstalled.
- Use the appropriate PPA's to update GIMP and LibreOffice to the current version. (GIMP 2.8 & LibreOffice 4.2)
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:otto-kesselgulasch/gimp
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:libreoffice/libreoffice-4-2
- Now command Linux Mint to use the above changes to the Software Sources
sudo apt-get update
add the following command to completely remove PulseAudio
sudo apt-get autoremove pulseaudio
Note: Once PulseAudio is uninstalled, the “Mixer” Item must be added to the bottom Panel to again have a volume control on the desktop.
So based on the above solution to get this laptop loaded, it would appear that some update related to PulseAudio is causing this “sound not working” situation on Laptops that are using the Ubuntu 12.04 repositories. (Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, or any other version of Linux that is based on Ubuntu 12.04)
