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Thursday, May 27, 2010

FC13 : solution to apparently all problems.

Yesterday I came across a tweet which said Fedora core 13 has been released. I have been using FC12 for over a month now and hence was excited about FC13. Although I am on the verge of crossing the data limit of my internet connection, I downloaded the live CD and gave it a try. I was astonished by my findings.

FC13 has done away with most of my problems.

I am merrily downloading the Installer DVD, can't wait for tech-magazines to ship it with them. I think most of the major distributions coming out now will be able to include the required drivers and hence work out of the box on my DELL. So in case you've been facing problems with your new laptop whose hardware was not supported by the contemporary distros, its time to switch over to Fedora Core 13

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 :)