On Tue, Jan 20, 2009 at 04:29:01PM -0500, Reid Vail wrote: That might relate. Was the plugging in successful? What sort of microphone? Was the cable attached to any other device? Have you tried plugging it in and out again? Was the plug tip undamaged? Was it difficult to plug in? A story: this might not be your problem, but it was fun to fix, and it might give you some ideas to explore. Friend of mine bought a laptop, and used it for showing audio and visual content at church. It is an Intel HDA sound device, with three 3.5mm TRS sockets at the front. One is marked as an input, the other two as output. He connected the output to the church sound system, which might have had phantom power. After this, the integrated speakers would not work, and the left-hand headphone channel would not work. Booting and old Linux on CD, Knoppix 3 something, could make the speakers work, but not Windows, and not a modern Linux. Therefore this was a software related problem. The Intel HDA sound system has a Conexant 20549 codec attached, and the codec has electrical sensing of the presence of the headphone plug. Not physical sensing like a switch, but electrical. Since we know the headphone jack is electrically damaged, it goes to show why the speakers are not working ... unless an older driver is installed that doesn't enable the "mute speakers when headphones are inserted" feature. This mute is not an ALSA control. Here is my write-up: "Success. I have the speakers playing and I understand the problem better. I made a change to the Linux kernel source code to ignore the headphones. Here is what seems to have happened; 0. there are two headphone sockets on the front, one is also an SPDIF optical output, and there is a set of speakers on the body of the laptop, 1. electrical damage to the headphone circuit, caused by either manufacturing fault or something peculiar about the church sound system, or static discharge, or power surge between power supply of laptop and earth conductor of church wiring (would be almost impossible to prove either way), 2. the left headphone amplifier section no longer functions, the right headphone amplifier section works fine, (both headphone sockets exhibit this symptom), 3. the left headphone amplifier is used as the method to detect whether headphones are present, since it is connected to the sharp end of the headphone plug, and so a half-inserted plug won't normally trigger it, 4. because the left headphone amplifier section has failed, the headphone detection operates as if the headphones are present, 5. the driver for the sound device notes the headphones are present and turns off the amplifier for the speakers." References: http://www.alsa-project.org/main/index.php/Help_To_Debug_Intel_HDA (developer section), cxt5045_hp_master_sw_put() function in patch_conexant.c source file, comment reads: /* toggle internal speakers mute depending of presence of * the headphone jack */ http://quozl.linux.org.au/2008-12-19-hp-present/

I loaded Knopix 5 .1 and the sound worked perfectly right away...and that's not a very old version ( < 2 years I think). So then I loaded the Ubuntu 8.10 liveCD and it also worked fine.

So this is not a speaker problem or a hardware (MB "soundcard" problem) and it's not an old software vs. new software problem. It can only be a configuration problem.

Thinking of trouble-shooting scenario, I wonder if it makes sense to reload the liveCD, capture the config and then boot off the HD and compare what's in place to what worked on the liveCD? If you think that's worthwhile can you let me know which configuration settings to capture.