I dual-booted Linux Mint and spent a lot of time troubleshooting, but I still have no sound. Ubuntu behaves the same way, while audio works normally in Windows. The problem also occurs when booting from a Linux live USB, so it does not seem limited to the installed system. How can I diagnose and fix the audio? The laptop is an HP ProBook 640 G1 with an Intel i5-4200M, 12 GB of RAM, Intel HD Graphics 4600, and a 500 GB Crucial BX500 SSD.
2 Answers
I’ve used this laptop model with Ubuntu for years. Since you also have no audio from a live USB, check the hardware mixer rather than only the desktop sound settings. Run alsamixer in a terminal, press F6 to choose the audio device if necessary, and make sure the relevant channels are not muted. Muted channels show “MM”; pressing M toggles them to “00”. Also check the volume levels and test both the built-in speakers and headphone output.
Please post the output of these commands. They will show whether Linux detects the sound card, which playback devices are available, and whether the audio driver is reporting errors:
cat /proc/asound/cards
aplay -l
pactl list short sinks
# or, on systems using PipeWire:
wpctl status
dmesg | grep -iE 'snd|hda' | head -40
I’ll run those commands and post the results when I’m back home from work. Thanks for pointing me in the right direction.
There’s no sound from the live USB either, unfortunately, so I’ll check the mixer controls and see whether anything is muted there.