[ltp] sound weirdness with X60s and Z61t + ubuntu 7.04

[Fredrik Wendt]

mån 2007-04-02 klockan 07:31 -0400 skrev Justin Mazzola Paluska: 
> On Mon, Apr 02, 2007 at 05:51:27AM -0400, Anirudh Ramachandran wrote:
> > This is when I started suspecting it's a hardware issue (like that
> > wireless on/off button near on the front edge... a friend spent almost
> > one day recompiling kernels before he realized the switch had
> > accidentally been tripped). I found this thread after a little
> > googling:
> 
> In this vein, have you made sure that it’s not muted?  There are the
> three audio buttons at the top-left of the keyboard.  Under Linux, if
> you mute it, it will stay muted no matter what you try to do with the
> ALSA mixer.   Pressing the “volume up” button a few times seems to
> give ALSA control over the volume again.
> 
> You can tell when it’s muted because the computer won’t beep, while it
> will beep (loudly) when it’s not muted.
> 	—Justin

The exact same thing just happened to me and my Z61t - I ran the Ubuntu
7.04 Beta live CD a couple of times (didn't have enough battery time to
complete the install) and everything was just fine. Sound worked and
after the first boot into 7.04 after installation, sound also worked as
it should (I noticed that the gnome "osd" stuff had changed when I used
the three buttons sitting by the Esc button).
However, now when I got back into 6.10, sound is completely gone.
Terribly annoying.

So I took Justin's advice above and tried to unmute the sound by
pressing the three aforementioned buttons from full volume down to mute
and back and forth a couple of times. Nothing happened. Open a gnome
terminal and pressed tab twice to "force" a beep, but it was still
completely silent.
Then I rebooted into 7.04 to see if I could get sound working there and
so it did. However, during upstart, I got a beep which I haven't
registered being there before and I also think I heard a few clicking
sounds just like you can here old stereos being turned on.
Next, I rebooted back into 6.10 and now sound works like it did before.

I've also noticed a difference in how big differences there are between
the sound levels in 6.10 and 7.04 (sorry for not knowing what kernels
and modules are used). Under 6.10 when pressing the volume down-button,
the difference is significantly larger than if I do the same thing under
7.04. 

A second difference is that I've got Fn+Home/End working under 6.10,
while it's broken (again) under 7.04. The behaviour under 7.04 is
completely unpredictable from what I can tell.

Kudos to all of you that makes software under GNU/Linux run on this
machine - it's a great tool when it works as expected!

/ Fredrik