Gfilui

trying to get Xubuntu working on an old machine (Inspiron 530). I've tried everything and have poured hours into this, but still nothing. The main takeaways:

alsamixer output:

mum@mum-desktop:~/Desktop$ alsamixer
cannot open mixer: No such file or directory

I've tried reinstalling everything from the mixer package to the alsa-base package. I've installed and uninstalled as many drivers as I could find. I've edited config files.

What's weird is that the sound was working when Vista was on this machine just a few days ago, and it worked on Xubuntu for 1 night after I managed to somehow open alsamixer, and now alsamixer doesn't work and there's no sound again. At my wit's end.

The only command that seems to recognize the sound card at all is lspci -v | grep -A7 -i "audio":

00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) HD Audio Controller (rev 02)
 Subsystem: Dell Inspiron 530
 Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 3
 Memory at fdff4000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=16K]
 Capabilities: <access denied>
 Kernel modules: snd_hda_intel

00:1d.0 USB controller: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB UHCI Controller #1 (rev 02) (prog-if 00 [UHCI])
mum@mum-desktop:~/Desktop$ 

aplay especially doesn't find it:

mum@mum-desktop:~/Desktop$ aplay -l
aplay: device_list:270: no soundcards found...

I think the chipset's sound card model is stack6-dell. I forget which conf file it is but I tried adding the "options" line at the end of it to add the model name. Still nothing. PulseAudio only shows dummy audio.

I'd really like to try and avoid buying a Windows 10 license because it's such an old machine. Any help is appreciated. Thank you!

Right, so I suspected something was up when I found a site with nightly builds of the audio driver, and they were all amd64. The version of 17.10 I was running was i386 - it was an older machine that came out right around when 64 bit CPUs started hitting the mainstream, and it only has 2GB of RAM anyway, so I thought whatever, I'll just get the i386 build.

Turns out, the driver for the audio system is 64 bit compatible only. Sort of shocking since this is an older machine though I guess for a lot of folks there isn't much point in upkeeping an i386 driver these days.

Anyway, the solution to this problem is literally to install 64 bit Ubuntu (I use Xubuntu). I went with 16.04 as it's LTS, but that's not what solved the problem.

Hope this helps someone down the line.

I have the same problem in in my Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, i followed numerous links, but this link helped me later. I downgraded my Linux kernel image to Xenial version.

$ apt-cache search linux-generic 

• linux-generic - Complete Generic Linux kernel and headers


• 
  OTHER IMAGES ......


• linux-generic-lts-xenial - Complete Generic Linux kernel and headers
  (dummy transitional package)

then installed with this command

$ sudo aptitude install linux-generic-lts-xenial

I also installed ubuntu-desktop package for 16.04 which contains ALSA related files

sudo aptitude install ubuntu-desktop