Getting sound to work on a Thinkpad R60e
At job, we have a huge stack of laptops. Those are mostly used for training but when we go out for consulting, we get to pick from the stack. Since we let student rip the OS to shreds, the stack is always freshly installed with a recent GNU/Linux distribution. There is lot of hardware diversity in the stack; last time I went for a Thinkpad R60e, and sound didn't work.
Since I'm out for a few weeks, no sound would be a major hit on my moral. Here is how I got the sound to work on Kubuntu Gutsy Gibbon (7.10). There might be an easier way to do it but the following worked.
First, a word on the problem. The sound card is an Intel ICH7.
$ lspci | grep Audio 00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) High Definition Audio Controller (rev 02)
With the default install, kmix will see all the channels but nothing will play. Some applications, like Amarok, will report that the device is busy, others like ogg123 will work perfectly fine with the progress bar and everything except that you will hear no sound.