Thinkpad X300 produces no sound

[Chris Jones]

I have just purchased a new Thinkpad X300 and it seems to have an unsupported flavour of the Intel HDA chipset (ICH8).
I have attached a full dump from /proc/asound/card0/codec#0

[Chris Jones (cmsj)]

I should mention that this is with hardy, but is *not* related to the recent problems with the 2.6.24-12 kernel and alsa, I did all my testing with 2.6.24-11

[Chris Scheib (schweeb)]

Confirmed, I have the same issues on my Lenovo X300. If anyone needs more info, please contact me

[Mathias (mathiaschulze)]

Same problem here. Even after the recent kernel upgrade to 2.6.24-14-generic, no sound. I can provide more info if needed.

[Russ-ST24 (russ-ryan)]

Again, I just installed the latest 8.04 and applied all updates, no sound.

[Chris Jones (cmsj)]

Just so everyone knows, this isn't going to be fixed in Hardy. The driver requires modifications to support this slightly different hardware which are not in ALSA upstream source yet.
Thanks to a helpful ALSA contributor (see the ALSA Mantis link at the top of this page) the modifications are almost finished.
I am going to try and produce a package specifically for the X300 which will contain this support, but I don't have a timeframe. any help welcome :)

[Russ-ST24 (russ-ryan)]

Hi Chris, not sure how I can help but I am keen to get this working.
I can test and am willing to learn but have not done any packaging in linux before.

Russhttps://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/200693

[phil (philippe-chapacou)]

same problem for me, running 8.04 beta on a brand new Lenovo X300 and no sound, whatever I do (e.g. recompiling Alsa's driver, lib & utils packages).

Running the latest kernel (*-16) and updates but still stuck.

Here is an abstract of the output from lshw:

*-multimedia
             description: Audio device
             product: 82801H (ICH8 Family) HD Audio Controller
             vendor: Intel Corporation
             physical id: 1b
             bus info: pci@0000:00:1b.0
             version: 03
             width: 64 bits
             clock: 33MHz
             capabilities: pm msi pciexpress bus_master cap_list
             configuration: driver=HDA Intel latency=0 module=snd_hda_intel

Any hint welcome.

Thanks,
Phil

[Chris Jones (cmsj)]

Obviously this should be Confirmed, but I'm setting the Importance to Low because this isn't suitable for fixing in Hardy and will naturally be fixed at some point in the future when the ALSA modifications are finished and they cut a new release. and we include it.

[blue (sobluege)]

I also suffer this problem now. because of this I cannot use skype to talk with my friend.

[Chris Scheib (schweeb)]

For anyone tracking this bug, fyi guys, there is a lot of progress on the ALSA Mantis site, click the link at the top if you're daring enough to try compiling it yourself. Just be conscious not to spam the bug reports.

[Chris Scheib (schweeb)]

the 20080424 snapshot appears to be fully functional with no patching required

[blue (sobluege)]

I don't want to compile. Is there any other way to solve this problem?

[phil (philippe-chapacou)]

I have tried the latest version of the snapshot (ftp://ftp.suse.com/pub/projects/alsa/snapshot/driver/alsa-driver-hg20080501.tar.bz2) and the result is still the same, i.e. no sound at all on my Lenovo X300.

I read somewhere that it was caused by a missing kernel module (soundcore.ko) which I built following instructions provided on the Alsa bug report web page but same [lack of] result alas.

The sound card is of type ICH8 which is not listed on their list of supported cards.

Where to look at at this stage???

Any [more] hint welcome :-)

Phil

[blue (sobluege)]

Accroding to http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Category_talk:X300, this bug will not be solved until kernel 2.6.26 is released.

But when kernel 2.6.26 will be released?

[QUATE]
Things that don't work:

* Audio:
  * Latest ALSA release shows Master and PCM only in the mixer and produces no audio
  * [2008-03-11] Nightly alsa-driver snapshot populates the mixer with more realistic entries, but is still silent on both speakers and headphones.
  * [2008-03-14] An extremely helpful ALSA developer is making the necessary changes. An early version is able to play sound and most of the card/mixer features work.
  * [2008-04-25] Patch is in git kernel now, we won't officially see it until 2.6.26 is released.
[/QUATE]

[Chris Scheib (schweeb)]

blue, please stop spamming the bug. There has been a fix posted, but you're going to have to wait for it to filter down through the release process if you don't want to compile yourself. If you are interested in compiling yourself, then please post on the forums and ask for help.

[angel (qresdor)]

Following instructions at http://redmonk.com/sogrady/2008/04/29/sog-1-busted-sound-0-getting-audio-working-on-the-x300-under-ubuntu/
I compiled a new version of alsa, with no change (using the 5.16 alsa release).

When trying to "modprobe snd_hda_intel" I got the error:

    FATAL: Error inserting snd (/lib/modules/2.6.24-16-generic/kernel/sound/acore/snd.ko): Unknown symbol in module, or unknown parameter (see dmesg)

however, I am running a 64 bit kernel, and have soundcore.ko (compiling a new one made no difference).

dmesg gives the following hint:
[ 842.887255] snd_hda_intel: Unknown symbol snd_ctl_add_slave
[ 842.888607] snd_hda_intel: Unknown symbol snd_ctl_make_virtual_master

Where to go from here?

[blue (sobluege)]

I downloaded the nightly code from http://ftp.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/tiwai/snapshot/ and wanted to compile, but I still failed. Can anybody help me?

Before I compiled, my laptop had not any sound, but volumn keys and command alsamixer looked good.

Following is what I had done:

1, rename old driver: /lib/modules/2.6.24-17-generic/ubuntu/sound/alsa-driver
2, move the nightly code to /lib/modules/2.6.24-17-generic/ubuntu/sound/alsa-driver
3, cd to /lib/modules/2.6.24-17-generic/ubuntu/sound/alsa-driver
4, sudo ./configuer --with-cards=snd-hda-intel
5, sudo make
6, sudo make install

Now I can have beep sound if I click the key "Tab" in termial, and here is output of alsamixer:

alsamixer: function snd_ctl_open failed for default: No such file or directory

How to do from here now? Thanks

[blue (sobluege)]

According the guide http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=726055&page=2&highlight=thinkpad+x300, now my Thinkpad x300 have sound!

[Chris Jones (cmsj)]

I've put a modified version of linux-ubuntu-modules into the thinkpad-x300 team PPA. Feedback would be useful (although probably not to this bug). They work for me.