A visitor to the site mentioned that he has the same laptop as I have yet is running Linux Mint rather than Ubuntu. He said that all the help that I was offering for getting Ubuntu to run well on the Studio 17 worked for him in Linux Mint except the headphone fix didn’t work. So, I dug in to see if I could find a solution.
I installed Linux Mint on my Dell Studio 1735 two nights ago and got the headphone jacks working successfully. Here’s step-by-step what I did:
- Installed the latest Linux Mint. As of this writing, the latest version is Linux Mint 6 Felicia.
- Booted and logged into the Linux Mint desktop.
- Ran mintUpdate by double-clicking the open padlock in the tray and clicked “Install Updates”.
- I then ran Synaptic (Menu > Administration > Synaptic Package Manager), clicked “Mark All Upgrades”, and clicked “Apply”.
- To make sure that any possible changes that could have fixed the headphone jacks had a chance to work, I rebooted. Amazingly, they already worked.
So, to make sure that you get the needed updates, run mintUpdate (Menu > Administration > mintUpdate) and install all the updates followed by running Synaptic (Menu > Administration > Synaptic Package Manager) and install all upgrades. This update process should install the 2.6.27-11-generic kernel. At this point, you should reboot your system so that you can load this new kernel. When the boot option screen (Grub loader) is brought up, make sure that you select the new 2.6.27-11-generic boot option (it should be default).
In step five, I say “amazingly” because when I first started to write this post, I had to do a lot of workaround to make the headphones work. However, I started again from a fresh install to verify the exact sequence of steps and found that things just worked this time. So, it may be that an update came out between my first try and second try that fixed this issue. If so, go Linux Mint team. 🙂
Please report your results with Linx Mint on your Dell Studio laptop.
As always, if you have a problem that you can’t find a solution to, ask in a comment or contact me.
Did I help you?
Hi Chris,
I have been having trouble getting sound from youtube (and other flash sources). It seems like the problem is with pulseaudio. When I remove pulseaudio using synaptic package manager everything is fixed, but I was wondering if you had found a more elegant way to fix the issue as maybe pulseaudio will be useful one day. I’m running 32-bit ubuntu intrepid and sound from youtube worked after one pulseaudio update, but not the next. It still works fine on my xps m1210 after recent updates so it may be hardware specific.
Glen
I haven’t played around with enable/disabling PulseAudio. I’m also not aware of the benefits of having it or what would be lost without. I’ll dig into the topic and see if I can find out more.