What is the exact make and model of the sound card?
Find out the above information and check the card’s manufacturer for “Linux” drivers and or support.

I’ve installed 5 or more versions of Linux and not one
of them will use the sound card(s).

Dell Optiplex / Pen3/ 600
Has a built in sound card ‘and’ a soundblaster card

Under Windows-XX the sound card(s) works just fine
load in any version of Linux and I’ve got nothing.

Just updated to the newest version of Ubuntu — NO JOY!
Had it check for hardware drivers and it found none.

Grandpa Bill

Grandpa Bill,
Hello, you could try and post the question on the the “Linux” forum…http://forums.linuxmint.com/ they have provided me with some measure of success with Mint Helena. Use their “Newbie” forum as they all speak in “CLI” (command line) in most of the other forums.Still having some wireless card problems, seems my learning curve is at a stand still for now. Regards Fred

Hi Grandpa Bill,

Linuxmint should be the easiest flavor to resolve the sound card difficulty. Have you used Synaptic to locate all possible sound card drivers? And have you found any proprietary drivers listed for your card in Synaptic?

And Fred, Mint normally supplies a couple of proprietary wireless card drivers that work very well. The big problem I had is that due to the wireless not initially functioning, I was unable to download the drivers! If you are having the same difficulty, plug in an Ethernet cable from your computer to your router to download the drivers. That worked for me and once I got the proprietary driver installed, the wireless took off.

Grandpa Bill, have you checked to see if a more recent BIOS update exists for your computer? If so, that may help resolve the sound issue with Linux.

You can change your workgroup name on the System page in Control Panel in XP and Win7. If there are any other questions related to the Windows side of things we need to start a new thread in one of the Windows forums.

If you go to the Hardware tab on the Sound Preferences dialog (on an Ubuntu machine running Gnome, this is under Preferences | Sound), what hardware is listed? And which Profile setting is selected? Also, on the Output tab, what is listed and what is selected? Sometime you have to try other selections (for hardware, Profile and output) to see which one (or combination) works.

Also, if you have multiple line-out connectors (I have one in the back of the box and another on the front) you might need to try the speakers in each of them (I once had the situation where the speakers worked just fine from the front panel but not from the back!)

Another thought – did you disable the on-motherboard sound in the BIOS? If not, try doing that. You might need to run with the Live CD so that Linux sees only the Soundblaster card and doesn’t get confused.

Just a quick note – you can take screen shots in Ubuntu using the Take Screenshot utility. You can find it under the start menu at Applications | Accessories | Take Screenshot. (There is a similar utility for KDE users.) The utility lets you capture the full screen, a window or a region (you can select what to copy.) The utility lets you save the screenshot as a file.

It looks likes the SoundBlaster card is not being seen; at least that is what I think that the hardware type of “Internal Audio Analog Stereo” means. I have seen discussions on other forums about problems with SoundBlaster on Linux (mainly lack of drivers).

At the bottom of the hardware tab there will be a drop-down box of profiles, try changing those and see if it helps.

only did a couple of plugins in FF

You can access the forums in Firefox on Ubuntu, right??

I’ve never opened ‘Gimp’ so won’t know where to start on it.

No gimp needed, the screenshot utility lets you save files in a number of formats.

Linux and windoes won’t play nice… I can see the linux box but not the drives or files..

I always transfer files while sitting at the Linux machine. If I have a share on Windows named \mypcnamesomeshare, then in the File Manager on Linux I enter this in the address box:

smb://mypcname/someshare

Then I am usually asked for the Windows login, after which the Windows share is shown. (You can easily share folders in Windows by right-clicking and selecting Share… I recommend creating a specific directory, such as c:sharing, and use that to transfer files from one machine to another (unless you are running Windows Professional, in which case I have an even better solution)

Since you are using Pro, there is a administrative share that has the same name as the disk drive with a $ suffix. Thus I connect using:

smb://mypcname/c$

That gives me access to the whole C: drive. Ditto for D:, E:, etc.