No sound with Intel ALC861VD

I recently bought (October 2007) a Lenovo 3000 N200 laptop which had Vista Family Basic installed. However being a Linux fan I installed Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon (7.10) to discover I had no sound. I tried SUSE 7.3 and Knoppix 5.3 but still no sound. The sound system worked fine under Windows but not Linux. I finally discovered that there was an update to the ALSA driver that enabled the ALSA driver to recognise the Intel ALC861VD sound device fitted to the Lenovo. The following link to the French Ubuntu forum cured my problems and I now have sound:-

http://forum.ubuntu-fr.org/viewtopic.php?id=145842

I take no credit for finding the solution offered here, but instead, offer eternal thanks to "jamdess" and "Apprenti_chercheur" for their excellent knowledge of Linux..

The first step is to download the latest ALSA driver and associated files from:- http://www.alsa-project.org/

At the time of writing 02/11/2007 the following versions were available, I suggest you download all of them:-

The following steps worked for me:-

Create a folder called "alsa" with the command;-

Code:
mkdir ~/alsa
Move the downloaded files to this directory.

Execute the following commands from within a terminal.

Code:

sudo apt-get install build-essential ncurses-dev gettext

sudo apt-get install linux-headers-`uname -r`

cd ~/alsa
tar -xvf alsa-driver-1.0.15.tar.bz2
tar -xvf alsa-lib-1.0.15.tar.bz2
tar -xvf alsa-utils-1.0.15.tar.bz2
tar -xvf alsa-oss-1.0.15.tar.bz2

cd alsa-driver-1.0.15
./configure --with-cards=hda-intel
make
sudo make install

cd ../alsa-lib-1.0.15
./configure
sudo make install

cd ../alsa-utils-1.0.15
./configure
sudo make install

cd ../alsa-oss-1.0.15
./configure
sudo make install

Edit your alsa-base file

Code:
sudo gedit /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base
Add the following line to the file

Code:
options snd-hda-intel position_fix=1 model=lenovo
Save the file and reboot the computer and hopefully you should now have sound.

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