Ubuntu dislikes my soundcard

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I am not a Linux expert, but I do OK. I have Ubuntu 9.10, Karmic Koala (I love the names!) on my older Dell Latitude laptop. I have manged to get everything working but I cant seem to get sound. Her is th output of ls lspc v and another command (i pasted to Tomboy and dont remember what I queried sorry):

00:1f.5 Multimedia audio controller: Intel Corporation 82801CA/CAM AC'97 Audio Controller (rev 02)
Subsystem: Cirrus Logic Device 5959
Flags: bus master, medium devsel, latency 0, IRQ 11
I/O ports at d800 [size=256]
I/O ports at dc80 [size=64]
Kernel modules: snd-intel8x0

*-multimedia UNCLAIMED
description: Multimedia audio controller
product: 82801CA/CAM AC'97 Audio Controller
vendor: Intel Corporation
physical id: 1f.5
bus info: pci@0000:00:1f.5
version: 02
width: 32 bits
clock: 33MHz
capabilities: bus_master
configuration: latency=0
resources: ioport:d800(size=256) ioport:dc80(size=64)

Pulseaudio will not connect either- "connection refused" it says.

can anyone help? I have scoured Ubuntu forums too, but nothing there has been successful. I may be too novice at Linus scripting, though. I used scripts I found on those forums to get my wifi Internet working with Ubuntu so I felt like i could do this too, LOL.

lspci output:
00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation 82830 830 Chipset Host Bridge (rev 04)
00:01.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82830 830 Chipset AGP Bridge (rev 04)
00:1d.0 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801CA/CAM USB Controller #1 (rev 02)
00:1e.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801 Mobile PCI Bridge (rev 42)
00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation 82801CAM ISA Bridge (LPC) (rev 02)
00:1f.1 IDE interface: Intel Corporation 82801CAM IDE U100 Controller (rev 02)
00:1f.5 Multimedia audio controller: Intel Corporation 82801CA/CAM AC'97 Audio Controller (rev 02)
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc Radeon Mobility M6 LY
02:00.0 Ethernet controller: 3Com Corporation 3c905C-TX/TX-M [Tornado] (rev 78)
02:01.0 CardBus bridge: Texas Instruments PCI1420 PC card Cardbus Controller
02:01.1 CardBus bridge: Texas Instruments PCI1420 PC card Cardbus Controller
07:00.0 Ethernet controller: Marvell Technology Group Ltd. 88w8335 [Libertas] 802.11b/g Wireless (rev 03)

I forgot this one sorry- it may have more information for you.

Well, the good news is that it actually sees the hardware.

I found the following link.. which is ancient. But maybe you never saw it and it can help?

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=31277

Also, oddly, I have had fresh installs where my sound was muted and I never noticed. I had to toggle the mute button.

Reading these four snippets, Karmic has identified the Intel hardware (1) and loaded the correct driver (2). What command generated the UNCLAIMED message (3)? Possibly the "connection refused" (4) is because the hardware is already in use.

I think possibly the volume is muted somewhere. Karmic changed all the volume settings and introduced per-application volume setting. Have a look at System -> Preferences -> Sound (or right-click on the speaker applet) and check that there is unmuted output in the first tab, hardware set to Ananlog Stereo Duplex (or Analog Stereo Out) in the second tab, the third tab sets microphone, the internal output is enabled in the fourth tab and whatever application you are trying appears in the fifth tab if necessary.

Also, start your multimedia application from a terminal to catch any errors or warning about misconfigured hardware.

Thanks Stuart- when I try to open up volume control it stays in the status "waiting for sound system to respond"

More information:
When I look at the properties for my user settings the box for "use audio devices" is not checked. I cannot change it however- everything is grayed out. Any thoughts or remedies?

EDIT: Scratch the above- I fixed it. I was logged in under failsafe gnome. I found after upgrading that the computer runs better in failsafe gnome, but certain things I have to do in gnome. 9.10 is very buggy in gnome, and I dont like how everything lags and the desktop gets broken up. I cant run the games or most other programs well unless I am in failsafe gnome.

Anyway- I still have no sound. Pulse Audio still refuses connection and the regular volume control gives me a box saying "waiting for sound system to respond"

If you post this bit (and whatever command generated it) and the make and model of laptop on http://ubuntuforums.org/index.php then people there can be very helpful and responsive - the Dell forum is very quiet, so the either the Multimedia & Video or the General forum is likely to get more response.

There is a whole 14-step program for debugging Ubuntu sound at https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Sound ... gProcedure

Thanks again Stuart! I will do that. It seems like this is my only bug left on the laptop. Beside this problem, it works better with Linux than it did with Windows. I think I have tried the 14 step program, but I will go over it again.

Possibly you installed with a bad disk and there is a flaw in the soundcard software.

may be you need to add something like
options snd-intel8x0 ac97_quirk=0 to /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf
(there are quit a few quirk modes, you need to find what work around is needed for your model even if this is the fix)

Well I ended up rolling back to Jaunty because it wasn't worth the hassle any more. It turned out that failsafe gnome doesn't have access to the speakers. But in Gnome my system would freeze and act up something ugly. so I had to choose between sound and functionality. Now I have to get my wireless card working on wicd.

Yes, Jaunty works well. My wireless was harder to configure with Karmic (and also the Lucid beta I just tried) and I have had a lot of annoying freezes / failures to resume etc. I didn't revert to Jaunty, but I keep a Jaunty CD with my laptop just in case...

I actually found a wonderful Linux distro called Mint. It is much better than Ubuntu IMO. I have been enjoying it, the wifi, and sound for a couple of hours.
I went through a lot more crap since my last post- it is far too hard to get stuff working in Ubuntu sometimes. All I had to do with Mint is load the Windows driver for my wifi card! Everything else works "out of the box". I just had to burn the ISO to the disk, which I already had wiped some old files off and burned Mint 8 on it. Lovely!

Slightly ignorant question - where do you get the Windows driver from, and where do you put it, in preparation for installing Mint? I was so frustrated with Ubuntu 9.10 and 10.04 that it seems to be necessary to connect to the internet with a wired connection in order to install the wireless driver. In 9.04 the wireless driver was installed automatically.

I saw a blog post from one of the Ubuntu developers about how explaining to some non-technical users how to prepare Ubuntu to watch a commercial DVD could be an absolute nightmare, and playing mp3 tracks is similar (1) - I understand that Mint also does these out-of-the-box.

(1) installing VLC is simple a one-step solution.

Well, I was hooked to the Internet with a wired connection for the install of the OS, but all I had to do was get the driver from the wifi card website- in my case Trendnet. Mint has a graphical interface for ndiswrapper, so all you have to do is follow prompts to get your driver installed, where in Ubuntu is was (for me ) a long process of coding in the terminal. Mintwifi already has 40 of the more common card drivers installed, so there is the possibility of your card being in there already. I have Mint 8, and they are working on 9, so there may be more drivers in the newr version

As for dvd- I only have a CD ROM, so I dont know about playback. I do know that it plays the mp3 though.

a minor point- I had to install the gnome game pack separately, but that took all of 15 seconds in the package manager.

I think it is a really fun and attractive OS. When you open a terminal there is a funny saying and a little graphic composed of characters.

System -> Administration -> Users and Groups
[ Click to make changes ]
[ Properties ]
[ User Privileges ]
* Use Audio devices
* Use video devices
[ OK ]
[ Manage Groups ]
* pulse
[ Properties ]
* your name
[ OK ]
* pulse-access
[ Properties ]
* your name
[ OK ]
[ Close ]