sound

[stan]

On Mon, 13 Feb 2012 15:15:43 +0000 (GMT)
Patrick Dupre <patrick.dupre at york.ac.uk> wrote:
... 
> Show what?
> The system settings>sound
> does not show any sound card (except the dummy one)!

Try 
aplay -lv
If that comes up blank, it means that alsa doesn't recognize any cards
on your system.  It is pretty good at recognizing cards (unless the
hardware is really new), so if is hasn't, I would suspect it is disabled
in the bios or there is a hardware error.

If your hardware is really new, you could load a related sound device
module and pass it options found in the kernel documentation for sound
to try to get some functionality out of it.

eg  You have an ALC893 and the latest alsa supported version is ALC891.
You would tell the kernel to pretend your device in an ALC891 hoping
that the interface is nearly the same as your related ALC893.

If it doesn't come up blank, then you have a configuration error.  I
advise installing pavucontrol and using it to configure your sound
device characteristics manually, since they weren't configured
automatically.