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I installed a sound card but when I go to System->Preferences->Sound and go to Hardware it's not showing anything at all. If I boot from the Live CD then it will show the card and it works. How can I make my Linux installation detect this card?

I was thinking that I could somehow copy the necessary files from the Live CD to make this work, but maybe there's an easier way.

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If sound works with the live CD, it should work with an installed system too. Are you running the same kernel on both (if in doubt, post the output of uname -a on both)? On the live CD, what driver is used (ls -l /sys/class/sound/audio/../../../driver/module)? Are there any messages related to this driver in /var/log/kern.log? – Gilles Aug 6 '10 at 18:02
The kernel has been updated from the Live CD. There's a lot of messages in /var/log/kern.log. What should I be looking for? – OSX NINJA Aug 7 '10 at 4:36
in /var/log/kernl.log, you should be looking at least for the module name, and for keywords like sound and audio and snd and alsa; there may be stuff not covered by these keywords, and there I'm afraid I can't say any better than anything that catches your eye. – Gilles Aug 7 '10 at 9:48
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Please post the link that you get when you download alsa-project.org/alsa-info.sh and run it with bash (NOT sh) – maco Aug 14 '10 at 2:52

1 Answer

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I would try resetting your sound card settings, I've had problems where my laptop "forgot" my sound card and this resolved it 

sudo aptitude -y purge alsa-base && sudo aptitude -y install ubuntu-desktop

More information at http://blog.zloether.com/2009/11/reset-sound-settings-in-ubuntu.html

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Didn't work. I think the problem is not with Alsa since the system doesn't even see the sound card. I think Alsa is just a way to communicate with the sound card, but detecting sound card hardware is probably some other program's job. – OSX NINJA Aug 6 '10 at 14:12
I'm not using ubuntu but it is alsa (kernel module) job to detect sound card. Possibly it is job of another program to install sound driver. – Maciej Piechotka Aug 6 '10 at 15:32

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