Disabling soundcard in X60 Docking Station - Ubuntu?

[hiver]

Hi Forum

I am running Ubuntu 9.04 on a Thinkpad X60, and if boot undocked, sound works fine. If booting docked, sound is muted (barely audible) - and I am guessing the sound card in the docking station takes over somehow.

Any ideas?

Thanks, M

[awolfe63]

There is no sound card on the docking station.

Are you using external speakers or the onboard speaker?

[hiver]

There is no sound card on the docking station.

Are you using external speakers or the onboard speaker?

Aha, i just figured there was one since there are in/output plugs.

I am not using external speakers - just onboard.

Update: I tried to open the screen while in dock, and manually push the volume tabs. It turns out the dock somehow mutes the X60 (without it being visible in Ubuntu) - and so manually unmuting and turning up the volume on the keyboard works! I just never tried this since I always use the machine docked (Closed) with an external monitor.

Anyway, problem pretty much solved - so only mystery now is why the docking headphone plug does not work when machine is automatically muted by the docking...?

Thanks, M

[awolfe63]

That's a thinkpad weirdness on certain models. Muting mutes everything. Docking does not normally mute the internal speaker - you need to turn down the volume.

[force]

I think it has to do with setting the hardware volume (maybe it's in the BIOS?) which controls the volume of the speakers (the hotkeys do this if you don't monitor the ACPI events). This can also be set through /proc/acpi/ibm/volume, I believe.

Then, there's the ALSA volume mixer (PCM) which controls the master card volume. I don't recall if the master PCM gets muted when you use the hotkey mute button, but it's something to check.

It's a bit annoying that there are two volume controls, but in Ubuntu, the hotkeys usually are tied to the software esound/GNOME volume control. You can change the behavior by using a different hotkey mask (0x00ffff, I believe) will mask everything for thinkpad_acpi to use. The ThinkWiki thinkpad-acpi article is a good place for information.