No Sound in Ubuntu 10.04

[Frans Ketelaars]

On Wed, 21 Jul 2010 13:23:41 -0400, Rob wrote:

> Has anyone else had problems with sound in 10.04?  I have two desktops
> here (the one I'm using now) and another one in another room.  I have
> 10.04 installed on this machine and the sound works fine.  It is a
> Lenovo A61 Tower w/AMD 64x2 processor.
> 
> My other desktop is an Alienware w/500 gig HD and 2 Gig RAM.  I have
> tried everything I can think of to get sound working including calling
> up the Alsa Mixer in a terminal (the Master is always muted which I then
> unmute and increase the volume with no effect).  I have a SB Audigy 2 ZS
> soundcard with Via 8237 chipset.
> 
> I know it's not a hardware problem because sound worked fine with prior
> versions of Ubuntu (and with a recent version of Dream Linux both from
> the live CD and, as installed to hard drive).
> 
> If anyone has had similar problems and solved it, I'd sure love to hear
> the fix!
> 
> Many thanks,
> Rob

I think that you have two soundcards: the onboard Via 8237 and the
Audigy 2 ZS . You can check with "cat /proc/asound/cards".

The Audigy 2 ZS needs firmware AFAIK. On Ubuntu 8.04 I found two related 
packages: alsa-firmware-loaders and alsa-firmware. Note that the latter 
is in the Medibuntu repository.

See "man alsamixer" on how to control both sounddevices. 

If you only want to use the Audigy 2 ZS you could blacklist the Via 8237 
module, in Ubuntu 8.04 it's called snd-via82xx. I don't know where to do 
that though :(

Good luck!

    -Frans