3/4 Success: Toshiba Tecra A9 Laptop speakers do not mute when external speakers plugged in

Ok. I don’t have a good explanation of this, and I don’t plan on having one because I don’t plan on reformatting my computer and going through each and every step. I kind of stumbled upon this one, and somehow got it working. Probably one of the worst things an engineer could do.. ugh. I hate not knowing the root cause, although I have my suspicions why things are working.

First of all, my Running Ubuntu 7.10 on my Toshiba Tecra A9. The Tecra has a RealTek ALC262.. and according to the ALSA documentation and a few postings online I read.. it isn’t normal for a toshiba to have a ALC262.

jwoo@aji:~$ cat /proc/asound/card0/codec#0|grep -i codec
Codec: Realtek ALC262

Ok. So The first couple of things that I did was try modifying /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base

Tried a couple things
1. At the end of the file, I added the following variations, none which seemed to work:

options snd-hda-intel model=toshiba
options snd-hda-intel model=lenovo
options snd-hda-intel model=auto
options snd-hda-intel model=basic

None of which seemed to work. Grr. So then I stumbled upon the following webpage:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/HdaIntelSoundHowto

Webpage seems kind of frightening with the “sudo make install” but being tired on a friday night, and pretty desperate (for the sound to work… not necessarily a date), I figure I give the instructions a shot with the new version of ALSA 1.0.15, since I noticed that Gutsy comes with 1.0.14. I also checked the change log of ALSA 1.0.15 and there was some mention of ACL262.. I figure I give it a shot.

Anyways.. followed the instructions.. rebooted..I guess I didn’t notice it right away because I expected the sound to muted once I plugged in the headphones. What happened *i think* is ALSA 1.0.15 (alsactl) correctly detects my soundcard/codec/whatever and comes up with new knob that specifically controls the volume of the speakers on the laptop. I guess it was done this way, so that you’re not limited to having the speakers or the headphone jack…. You have the option of having one, the other, or both playing.

One thing does bother me about the make install processes of that website (which is why it’s a 3/4ths success). Looking at the dates of what’s inside /lib/modules/2.6.22-14-generic/ubuntu/media/snd-hda-intel
the date for snd-hda-intel.ko is at 2007-10-12. Does this mean I’m still running the 1.0.14 version of the kernel module? Probably. Why can I properly control the laptop speaker volume and the headphone jack volume? Perhaps all I needed were the newer versions of the ALSA user space libraries? Hmmm.. interesting… Maybe one of these days I’ll find out..

So… final config that i have…

1.
/etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base has the following line appended to the end of the file:

options snd-hda-intel model=basic

2. Doing a half ass install (following the hdaintelsoundhowto) of Alsa 1.0.15.

time to sleep.