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ATI IXP AD1981B (Thinkpad R51e) sound on Jaunty

8 Comments Posted by sandeep on May 14, 2009

This was tough.. so here’s a quick list:

Your sound preferences should look like this:

R51e sound preferences

Your alsamixer should look like this

R51e alsa preferences

Install the following

sudo apt-get install asoundconf-gtk gstreamer0.10-alsa libasound2-plugins libesd-alsa0

sudo apt-get install gnome-alsamixer

sudo apt-get install bum

Your boot-up-manager should look like this (notice the unchecked PulseAudio) die.. pulse.. die!!

R51e boot up manager preferences

Reboot and enjoy

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8 Responses to ATI IXP AD1981B (Thinkpad R51e) sound on Jaunty

Bartosz Wierzejewski May 24, 2009 at 7:18 am
Hallo.
Why those pictures are so small.
I can’t see anything, pls upload bigger.

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Simón May 26, 2009 at 2:35 pm
Well, I have a an ATI IXP SB4000, AC’97 Audio Controller. I already had the pulseaudio deactivated, but it kept appearing as a working process, to the point that for hearing music on the internet, I had to kill the process.

Install the BUM, and unchecked it, reboot and all, but now I’m starting the computer again and in the System Monitor, there he is, the damn PA. And without killing it first, I still can’t watch videos on the internet.

Any suggestions for my particular sound card?

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sandeep May 29, 2009 at 6:56 pm
@Bartosz – fixed. sorry abt that.

@Simon: Pulse is on-demand. which means if ANY of the apps that you have on your computer are requesting pulse audio, it will start up automatically.
You could try uninstalling Pulse altogether, or try to see which of your apps is requesting for pulse.

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Simón May 29, 2009 at 10:05 pm
When I try to Uninstalling it through Synaptic, it says that it would also Unistall Ubuntu-Desktop. So, as far as I know, that wouldn’t be a good thing to do, right?

What you think would be my hopes to ever fix this problem?

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sandeep May 30, 2009 at 10:43 am
@Simon – please take what I am writing with a grain of salt.

Ubuntu-Desktop is actually a metapackage – that is it is just an alias which “bundles” lots of packages together (for example, Gnome, X.org, etc.)
One of the things in this “bundle” is pulse-audio. When you try to remove pulse, Ubuntu recognizes that the validity of the alias is no longer true – so it removes the alias ONLY. All the packages that have been installed previously (as part of the bundle – like X.org, etc.) are not uninstalled.

Unless you have done anything else, you can do this safely. However, please do backup things – shit happens.

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Simón May 30, 2009 at 3:09 pm
Well, your good convincing people, hehe. Well, as a matter of fact, I did some research before doing something that would provoke a reformating of the computer, and found out that most possibly, if I unistalled PA, then I wouldn’t be able to log in, unless I would install PA again, from the terminal, in the log in screen.

So, thought that I wouldn’t do anything, until I found this post: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=6068479. Surely, we’re using Jaunty and the post is design for Intrepid, but the issue is the same. Being able to absolutely kill, forever and ever, the beast PulseAudio and still have a computer to work in.

And it worked! Installing esound from one side, and deleting the “/etc/X11/Xsession.d/70pulseaudio” file did worked for me. Of course, maybe it would work without doing this two steps, but why risking things?

In anyways, thanks for your help!

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sandeep June 3, 2009 at 8:36 am
@Simon, for records sake – could you post your laptop model here .. and the steps you followed?

did you do

killall pulseaudio
sudo apt-get remove pulseaudio
sudo apt-get install esound
sudo aptitude install alsa-utils
sudo rm /etc/X11/Xsession.d/70pulseaudio
rm ~/.asound*

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Simón June 5, 2009 at 5:18 pm
First of all, my computer is an old Toshiba Satellite M45 S169. Second of all, I installed alsa-utils in the first place. Then, killall pulseaudio, install esound, remove it, and doing the trick with that .asound file. That worked for me, in the sense that there’s finally no PulseAudio to worry about.

But it seems that was not the problem that I had. Surely I don’t need to kill PA everytime I log in, but the sound still crashes once in a while, videos remain static and “bells” are heard. The one thing that I’m curious about is that even if the sound is crashed with “bells” or anything else, RhythmBox still works perfectly, with the little detail that if you close or stop it, the last sound reproduced is heard, as “bells”; quite annoying, as a matter of fact, hehe.

So basically, there’s no PA now. But I think that the problem is something else, hope something that could be fix without formatting the computer.

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