Sound stopped working on Ubuntu 16.10, Dell vostro 5568

I just installed Ubuntu 16.10 on my Dell Vostro 5568 laptop. Everything was working fine (good sound from the speakers). Then I plugged my headphones (Koss) in the headset connector.

The audio controller on the laptop is a Realtek ALC3246 with Waves MaxxAudio Pro. The external interface (connector number 6, in the above figure) is a microphone in/stereo headphones/external speakers connector.

Ubuntu then showed a popup dialog with a question about the type of the device I was trying to connect. I think there were 3 options. I could choose between microphone/headphones/headset. I chose headphones. And after that, there was good sound from my headphones for some hours. Then I unplugged the headphones. And sometimes later I tried replug the headphones, but then suddenly there was no sound from the headphones at all. Also, when I unplugged them there was no sound from the speakers either.

I tried to restart the machine, but it did not help. Everything is muted.

If I open System Settings->Sound with the headphones unplugged, I get this screenshot:

When I try push the Test sound button, there is no sound from either the front left, or the front right speaker.

Edit:

After googling for more advice, I decided to try reinstall alsa-base and pulseaudio

sudo apt-get remove --purge alsa-base pulseaudio
sudo apt-get install alsa-base pulseaudio

However, after rebooting the audio icon had disappeared from the Unity system tray, and in addition I am no longer able to open System setting from the system tray.

So now the situation is even worse than before since I cannot access any system settings at all ( including audio settings ).

Any advice?

3 Answers

To restart pulseaudio you can use the following commands in a terminal:

 sudo pulseaudio -k; pulseaudio -D;

This should bring the sound back, don't know about the system tray icon. Might come back when I find out how that works. Appears to be a bug in Ubuntu 16.10, happens to me too when connecting headphones or other external devices (loudspeakers, amplifiers etc.) Please file a bug on launchpad!

I see you were playing with Pulseaudio, which can work or not, and in this case you got into more problems than before.

First try this:

killall pulseaudio; rm -r ~/.config/pulse/* ; rm -r ~/.pulse*

Then:

sudo apt-get update;sudo apt-get dist-upgrade; sudo apt-get install pavucontrol linux-sound-base alsa-base alsa-utils lightdm ubuntu-desktop linux-image-`uname -r` libasound2; sudo apt-get -y --reinstall install linux-sound-base alsa-base alsa-utils lightdm ubuntu-desktop linux-image-`uname -r` libasound2; killall pulseaudio; rm -r ~/.pulse*; ubuntu-support-status; sudo usermod -aG `cat /etc/group | grep -e '^pulse:' -e '^audio:' -e '^pulse-access:' -e '^pulse-rt:' -e '^video:' | awk -F: '{print $1}' | tr '\n' ',' | sed 's:,$::g'` `whoami`

And let us know.

In my case, this helped my problem in my Dell Inspiron 1547.

Best regards.

my only workable solution with Vostro 5568: In Bios switch audio off, reboot to Bios, switch audio on again. Solved audio problem for Linux and Windows 10 after plugged my headphones (Koss) in the headset connector.