On Fri, 10 Feb 2023 Default User wrote:
Hello to all!
Hello. Full disclosure: I know very little about audio troubleshooting.
I just got a brand new Dell Inspiron 15 3000 Series 3511 laptop. Came with Windows (ugh!) preinstalled. My old Dell Inspiron 15 3000 Series 3542 laptop (made in 2014) just died. So this one should work, right? No. Unfortunately the new 3511 is quite different from the old 3542. It mostly "sort of" works. But the sound will not work at all on Debian.
How did you come to this conclusion? Did you do something, take some action, expecting the result to be audible, but obtained silence instead? If so, what was that something? What volume controls have you examined? Have you checked whether they are muted? Personally, one of the first things I usually do to get sound to work (when I notice my media player makes no sound/youtube videos are silent/etc) is run alsamixer (in package alsa-utils) and unmute all the playback volume controls. But I've never used your DE. And again, I'm no expert.
Not wanting to immediately remove Windows and thus make it unreturnable, I have been trying to run it using a Debian 11 "Live" install USB thumb drive (Cinnamon desktop). No sound at all.
Throughout this thread, you report the result of "No sound", but never do you specify what you are doing that results in unexpected silence.
But . . . it DOES work when running the computer from a USB thumb drive of the most recent version of SystemRescue! So, it CAN work (somehow) on (some) Linux setups. Note: System Rescue is now based upon Arch Linux. Using the Debian 11 USB thumb drive, I was not able to do a complete update and upgrade - not enough room on the USB thumb drive. I was able to install the pavucontrol package, which I recall has sometimes helped in the past. But still no sound.
Still no indication of how you have arrived at this conclusion! [snipped hardware info]
I poked around in the Debian wiki about fixing sound problems, but to be honest, much of it is over my head.
Me too.
So . . . any advice on how to get sound to work on this computer?
No matter the problem you want help troubleshooting, make sure your report prominently specifies not only the unexpected behavior, but also WHAT YOU DID that resulted in that unexpected behavior. That will help people help you. Good luck to you. -- Ce qui est important est rarement urgent et ce qui est urgent est rarement important -- Dwight David Eisenhower
