Comment 54 for bug 275998

I have a Dell XPS 1330 using Kubuntu 8.10 and KDE 4.1.3 -- this system has (had) extremely low volume input.

When PulseAudio is installed (and actually running - the default /etc/init.d/pulseaudio startup script fails to do anything and just exits) KMix presents two input sources Digital and Analog Mic. When Volume Control (Record) is opened it shows activity when speaking and the Digitial option is enabled, the sound however is extremely low and I have to talk about 3mm from the input point on the top of the laptop screen.
Analog input doesn't record anything usable. I have to shout very loudly to get any type of input.

I'm surprised at something so basic as sound input fails to work properly on a modern laptop. No disrespect to the developers but is there any testing of such basic item before a release ? If not, I'm happy to help out testing audio (maybe even pulseaudio) on this setup with Jaunty -- it's better than spending literally hours & hours googling around and tweaking various audio controls.
My sound worked fine on Hardy, I presume without Pulse installed.

My solution was to *purge* all possible pulse packages and reboot. I have nothing against PulseAudio, just my system works better without it :)
I got rid of all of them apart from libpulse0 which wanted to remove quite a lot of other dependencies as well (like dragonplayer, xine etc). I now have working sound input and output. I don't think the Digital Input works but I don't care as long as I can get some sound into the PC without shouting.
The only other side effect is that alsamixer cannot run as it tries to connect to a non existent pulseaudio process, but that's no big deal for me. I wonder why it is hard wired now to use pulse ?

Finally, I added this to my /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base, although I don't know if it helps:
options snd-hda-intel model=5stack

Thanks and I hope this helps others.