Sound from speakers but not from headphone jack...

[strangebiscuit]

I just bought a Toshiba Satellite X205-S9359 model laptop and I've tried a load of distributions on it. Tried Ubuntu 7.04, Vector 5.8, Mepis 6.5, PCLinuxOS 2007, Fedora Core 7 and so on. Sabayon 3.4f so far is the only distro that boots to a functional desktop. Everything else but PCLinuxOS crashed on boot. Anyway...

Everything is working pretty nicely but oddly enough though I do get sound from the built-in laptop speakers, when I plug into the headphone jack nothing happens. Sound continues to play through the speakers and nothing in the headhpones. Kmix says the output is HDA Intel. All the switches are turned off. Tried specifying a few sound architectures (ALSA, OSS, etc...) but no change.

Has anyone experienced anything like this? If I can fix this problem then everything will be pretty much flawless. Very very impressed with Sabayon 3.4f so far. Apparently it's one of the only distros out there that support fairly cutting edge laptop hardware.

[joost]

You might wanna try running alsaconf (as root)

Then run alsamixer afterwards.

[strangebiscuit]

Thanks for replying

Tried it but no change whatsoever.

If it's of any use alsamixer says my card is "HDA Intel" and my chip is "Realtek ID 268". The volume options I'm given are for "Master" and "PCM", and the switches available are "Caller ID" and "Off-hook".

[Fitzcarraldo]

If you haven't already done it, it might be worth emerging the latest ALSA packages:

alsa-firmware-1.0.14
alsa-headers-1.0.14
alsa-lib-1.0.14a-r1
alsa-plugins-1.0.14
alsa-tools-1.0.14
alsa-utils-1.0.14

(These will also pull in the latest version of alsamixer.)

Once you've emerged the above, run alsaconf (obviously don't select the 'legacy' card, if one is shown) and alsamixer again and make sure nothing is muted again (the M key toggles) and all sound levels are non-zero. Then run KMix and check the same thing and also GNOME Volume Control, just to be sure (I find the latter more reliable that KMix on my Acer laptop). Also, right-click on the KMix icon in the top panel and select Select Master Channel... and try selecting Front as the channel representing the master volume (that's the one that works on my Acer laptop and enables the keyboard function keys on my laptop to control the volume and mute).

Don't forget to hit TAB in alsamixer to select the different pages. And don't forget to use KMix and GNOME Volume Control and set them both to show all the configurable parameters (they don't by default). I sometimes find something shown as disabled in one that is not shown as disabled in the other, that's why I like to double-check (perhaps they will be consistent in your case, you never know).

Although this probably does not have anything to do with the headphone socket, you could also have a play with the settings in K Menu > Control Centre > Sound & Multimedia > Sound System. You might try clicking on the Hardware tab and changing Select the audio device to Advanced Linux Sound Architecture (ALSA) and ticking the Full duplex box. I've had to do these sometimes to get sound working. Currently I have Enable the sound system unticked under the General tab to stop arts (so that Skype works) and audio still works from the headphone socket.