Dear Friends:

I don't post much, but have learned a lot from everybody here. Thanks!

I have a Sony Vaio laptop, model VPCSA, running 64-bit Ubuntu 13.04. I am having two problems many others are also having (on other brand machines as well) with 13.04.

1. My sound works every other boot. When it isn't, nothing I try in terminal such as Alsa commands, following the many suggestions on the Ubuntu forums, restarts the sound server, unless I reboot. (Just logging out and logging back in does not restart the sound system.) Once I reboot, it works just fine. This is very frustrating! I have to listen to several college audio lectures every day, plus I enjoy online Bible @ www.dailyaudiobible.com and also I listen to talk radio.

2. When my sound is working, and I plug in my headphones, they work just fine. However, this does NOT cut off the laptop's built-in speakers, which is sometimes irritating to the family, especially since I am an early bird, and they like to get up a couple of hours after I do.

Thanks in advance!

If you open the GUI Alsa Mixer, you should see a tab labelled, "Options" to the right. Click that and you should see the option, "Auto-Mute Mode:" which is most likely set to, "Disabled" change that to, "Enabled" and the speaker sound should switch off automatically when you insert your headphones.

At the bottom of the Alsa Mixer window, there is a, "Select Controls..." button. Click that and see which controls you may need but which aren't selected. (I normally select all the available options )
Set the Master Volume full, then adjust the head phones volume to a comfortable level.

Make any other adjustments that seem warranted.

Play around with the controls and see what they do.


Now, about the intermittent failure of sound, when that happens, from the command line, type the following;
And when the sound is working type;
[code]dmesg > dmsg-sound.txt
[code]
Then attach those to files when you report back here. Perhaps we can find the difference between the two bootups this way.

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Thanks a million!