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Geek Stuff : Tutorials : Ubuntu : No Sound Drivers After Upgrade from 7.10 to 8.04

May 5, 2008

I recently upgraded from Ubuntu 7.10 "Gutsy Gibbon" to the recently released Ubuntu 8.04 "Hardy Heron" and encountered numerous problems with programs and drivers. I'm posting the solutions to these problems as I find them.

<rant>
After the "upgrade" (from a perfectly working 7.10 system) to the new Ubuntu 8.04 I noticed my sound card was no longer working. This is really irritating, since it worked before. Did something change in the kernel to make it quit? (unlikely) Something happened where the new Ubuntu version no longer recognizes my sound card. Whatever drivers that made it work in the previous 7.10 are simply gone now. Did the new "upgrade" of Ubuntu remove them? I don't know. It's bullshit if you ask me.
</rant> Solution has been found and follows below..

Shortly after the upgrade, after a fresh reboot, I noticed I had no sound and clicked on the sound icon in the top panel.

The initial error message was almost completely useless. I might as well have said "your shit don't work, son!"

After closing the initial error message box any future attempts to mess with the sound icon result in a much more terse, and even less useful, error message.

This annoyed me greatly. Not only did my sound work fine before the recent "upgrade", but when I ran the lshw command in a terminal window it clearly showed that I obviously still have a sound card installed in the computer! GFD.

After much reading and searching I finally found the solution in a forum post at http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=4811780 (just in case: Google cache). The poster commented that installing the "386 kernel" (he had been running the "generic" kernel) fixed his sound.

I already knew I was running the 386 version of the Linux kernel by running the uname -r¹ command. This shows that I am running the 2.6.24-16-386² kernel, shown in the screen shot below.

At this point I was desperate. So I decided that I no longer cared if it made sense, dammit. I was gonna try to reinstall it.

So I ran the sudo apt-get install linux-386³ command in a terminal window. Since it needs to run as the root user we use preface the command with sudo, which then prompts for your sudo password⁴. It took less than 5 minutes for the installation, not bad.

And after a quick reboot of the system I noticed the boot-up sound played, logged in, and I now have sound again! It's a happy thing. :)