Solved the no sound problem on my dell :)

It was right on Day one that I formatted my new Laptop's hard drive to create partitions on it and install Linux. Well that was in fact a failure because of the ACPI problem. But after I came to know about acpi=off work around I managed to install linux and then the most torturing problem on my system was absence of sound. I nearly spent the whole next week trying to figure out (rather google out) the solution. But it was not there. It was just day before yesterday that I stumbled upon the solution.

The problem was :

There was no sound from the inbuilt speakers, and one of the two jacks worked but produced sound which was barely audible. I lingered over forums for a very long time - meanwhile switched and tried different distros .. hoping one of them might come with a solution by default.

Attempts made by me to solve it:

Most of the times when I looked into search results that said "solved", what I found was "the audio channel was muted". I also found posts that asked me to modify the modprobe.conf and add dell-m6 after intel-hda-snd etc. but none of them worked ... in fact I found a complete list of such options that could be appended on to the modprobe.conf file and tried every one of them that was related to dell.

Recently After installing Arch Linux I came across OSS - Open Sound System and installed it instead of ALSA.. it seemed to work but I couldn't figure out how to mute the speakers while using head phones. I was determined to look for the solution in the same direction.

Solution:

The way to get it to work is to install the new version of alsa ( god why couldn't I think of it .. argh). For obtaining it follow the ***link*** to realtek's site. This is the genius post which brought me closer to the solution. And this is where I was spoon fed with it.

I am loving it :)