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I have a Dell Latitude 6520 laptop with 8 GB RAM, internal speakers, and Audio Technica ATH-M50x headphones. I just used Bittorrent to download, and Windows 7 to burn a bootable install DVD, for the 64-bit version of RC 7. It seemed to go OK, with over 3,000 packages installed via the DVD and the hard-wired Internet connection. I had to install a printer package at the terminal prompt for the printer, but now it works fine, too.

The problem is that I hear no sound from either the speakers or the headphones, even though Dragon Player goes through the motions of playing an audio CD, or YouTube via Firefox shows me a young woman playing a guitar. The PulseAudio volume control has a horizontal bar that bounces along happily with all sources showing down the dialog box, but still no sound. From some dark corner I got the idea to do a PulseAudio status query, with the following result:

Code: Select all

[ken@localhost ~]$ systemctl status | grep pulseaudio
           │   │ ├─pulseaudio.service
           │   │ │ ├─9003 /usr/bin/pulseaudio --daemonize=no
           │     ├─26450 grep --color pulseaudio

How may I allow this laptop's audio to be heard?


Ken

You don't mention which desktop environment you are using, but most provide a system settings tool that lets you configure your sound hardware. Check there to see if you have more than one sound device - if so, try selecting each one in turn. Also check that the output for that device is not muted!

Thank you for your reply.

The desktop environment is Plasma, and, as it turned out, the Pulse Audio Volume Control itself provided the interface for the solution.

After explicitly turning off all channels not providing the immediate output, sound returned to my ears. In this case, the extraneous device is a Dell 4K Display Link, which does have HDMI connectors as well as a headphone jack that was not being used in favor of a direct laptop output. So, a deep dive into the technical internals was not necessary, but rather just paying close attention to the interface and allowing to operate only the channel needed for the headphones allowed sound to return.

Thanks for your attention.


Ken