I can't hear any sound

Okay lets try a little alsa configuration and diagnostics. Start yourself a command line.

If you type "sudo cat /proc/asound/pcm" what do you get? Post the full output here.

Now, find yourself a sound file that has few issues, probably the easy way is to do "locate *.au", which will give a list of files. The lines ending in .au are going to be audio files, probably from programs you have installed.

Now to try play one of those, do this "aplay <paste-the-full-path-to-a-sound-file-here>".

Do you hear anything?

MP3 files are some what different, as they are played back by a codec which has licensing issues. Do you recall installing mp3 support, if not, I will point you at https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RestrictedFormats which should help you out there.

this is the output you asked for:

klaas@klaas:~$ sudo cat /proc/asound/pcm
00-00: ALC883 Analog : ALC883 Analog : playback 1 : capture 2
00-01: ALC883 Analog : ALC883 Analog : capture 2
00-02: ALC883 Digital : ALC883 Digital : playback 1
00-06: Si3054 Modem : Si3054 Modem : playback 1 : capture 1

when I tried the aplay ... command, I couldn't head anything but it returned this:
klaas@klaas:~$ aplay /usr/share/doc/sun-java5-jdk/demo/plugin/applets/TicTacToe/audio/yahoo2.au
Playing Sparc Audio '/usr/share/doc/sun-java5-jdk/demo/plugin/applets/TicTacToe/audio/yahoo2.au' : Mu-Law, Rate 8000 Hz, Mono

Right, that is interesting. It actually played it, but that you couldnt hear anything.
Do you have a speaker icon in your tray? If you double click it you should get a mixer applet pop up. Have you got the main volume, and the PCM volume up from zero?

Try bringing those up, and then playing the sound again.

I set them as loud as possible, again without any result and there was no "main volume" there (screenshot: http://www.brassocontinuo.be/kmix-screenshot.jpg).
I also noticed a strange thing in the alsamixer:
look at http://www.brassocontinuo.be/alsa-screenshot.jpg. there is no '00' under the PCM bar, is this normal?

Umm- I cannot view those images, the domain name seems to be wrong. Do you have another URL?

Umm as for the 00, I do see it on my setup under PCM. You dont have the PCM set to muted do you (MM)? I cant see the images, and admit to guessing here.

If you do, in alsamixer, move the cursor to PCM, and press M to unmute it.

I don't have another domain, but try those links again, the server crashes from time to time.

When I press the m button in alsamixer under PCM, nothing happens.

Now antoher "problem": when I start Amarok to play an audio file: it says "xine was unable to initialize any audio drivers". I don't know what this means, but maybe It might help someone to figure out the solution.

Hmm - I can see those now thanks. Now that is very interesting. There is no enable or mute for PCM, no master volume, apart from what is the horizontal slider at the bottom of the KMix dialog?

The Amarok complaint is a standard one you will see if for any reason it cannot access your sound hardware. This thread: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=202555&page=3 is directly relating to your issue. Unfortunately they do not seem to come to any satisfactory conclusion.

I have gently suggested that those posting escalate it to a bug report, as they are having to manually apply patches against the Alsa drivers for it to work.

Hi there,

What version of Kubuntu are you running? I too have a Acer Laptop using the same soundchip (AC883), and it the driver wasn't included in the Dapper (6.06) kernel. I wrote about how to get sound on my blog - http://www.sheepeatingtaz.co.uk/blog/2006/09/18/laptop/

I have since upgraded to the Edgy Beta version, and it is included in the kernel in the latest version

Hope This Helps!

I run kubuntu 6.06LTS (Dapper Drake)

I tried that solution before, it always gives me:

klaas@klaas:~/download/alsa-driver-1.0.13rc2$ sudo ./configure --with-cards=hda-intel
checking for gcc... gcc
checking for C compiler default output file name... configure: error: C compiler cannot create executables
See `config.log' for more details.

maybe there is a solution for this problem?

thanks again for your support.

Hmm - that is awkward. Can you try the following for me:
open up a terminal. Create and cd to a temporary directory.
Type the following lines:

echo "#include <stdio.h>" > test.c
echo "void main() { printf(\"hello world \\n\"); }" >>test.c
gcc -o test test.c
./test

What do you get? You should see gcc moan/warn about not returning an int, and then "hello world" printed to the terminal. If not, you might not have the development/build toolchain set up properly.

This is what gcc gave me:

klaas@klaas:~/tmp$ echo "#include <stdio.h>" > test.c
klaas@klaas:~/tmp$ echo "void main() { printf(\"hello world \\n\"); }" >>test.c
klaas@klaas:~/tmp$ gcc -o test test.c
test.c:1:19: error: stdio.h: No such file or directory
test.c: In function ‘main’:
test.c:2: warning: incompatible implicit declaration of built-in function ‘printf’
test.c:2: warning: return type of ‘main’ is not ‘int’

And of course:

klaas@klaas:~/tmp$ ./test
bash: ./test: No such file or directory

Apparently, the stdio.h file was not found be the compiler (and indeed, I couldn't find it on my pc neither).

So I reinstalled the gcc packages, but with the same frustrating result: stdio.h not found.

Arg - that is pretty serious. Good job I did that test then. Okay... If I locate stdio.h on my machine, it is in plenty of places, I strongly suspect the one I want is /usr/include/stdio.h.

If you do "ls -l /usr/include/stdio.h" what do you get?
If use "wajig whichpackage" (wajig is a dpkg command line wrapper, simplifies things a lot, and is in universe) - I get libc6-dev.

If I check where it came from with "wajig policy libc6-dev" it has come from main. So make sure you have libc6-dev installed.

So

when I first did 'ls -l /usr/include/stdio.h', it said: file not found or something like that. Then I installed libc6-dev (via apt-get, as usual) and this fixed the problem. Now ls -l /usr/include/stdio.h gives me

-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 27936 2006-05-21 20:32 /usr/include/stdio.h

which is, I guess, normal.
Then I tested:

klaas@klaas:~/tmp$ gcc -o test test.c
test.c: In function ‘main’:
test.c:2: warning: return type of ‘main’ is not ‘int’
klaas@klaas:~/tmp$ ./test
hello world

Now Ithe only thing left is to install the alsa-driver.

Thanks for all the help.

i can not hear any sound in ubuntu. my sound card device is to hda intel alsa. pls help me.