No sound on Realtek ALC260

I installed lubuntu 20.04 to my mom’s old office computer, a HP Compaq dc5700, just to try out linux for the very first time. So far I’ve spent about 24 hours playing with ubuntu (installed but didn’t run smoothly) and lubuntu to learn how linux systems work.

I can’t get sound to work on lubuntu and ubuntu. It did play very noisy audio when I plugged in my headphones to the line out. The internal speaker never played any sound in linux. In windows xp (dual boot), both headphones and internal speaker works fine. aplay -l shows that it’s a Realtek ALC260 integrated audio card, which is consistent with its spec sheet. lshw says that the loaded driver is snd_hda_intel. I followed ubuntu’s audio troubleshooting guide without success, and also some other random stuff I googled.

I’m guessing there’s no proper driver for this old sound card. Is there any reasonable chance of getting this to play?

Open a terminal and run lspci -nnk | grep -A 2 -i audio and copy and paste the section related to your sound card here.

~$ lspci -nnk | grep -A 2 -i audio
00:1b.0 Audio device [0403]: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) HD Audio Controller [8086:284b] (rev 02)
        Subsystem: Hewlett-Packard Company 82801H (ICH8 Family) HD Audio Controller [103c:2808]
        Kernel driver in use: snd_hda_intel
        Kernel modules: snd_hda_intel

Interesting that’s not a Realtek. If you run lspci -nnk and don’t filter the results, do you get multiple audio devices?

No, I just see one audio device which is the same as the one I posted.

Maybe it’s not a Realtek device but just a device that use Realtek ALC260 codec. I’m quite new to all these. Usually I just go to the manufacturer’s website, download the given driver and install. Don’t usually know what is what. :sweat_smile:

So I booted into windows to check. It’s listed as Realtek High Definition Audio in xp. Device properties list the manufacturer as Realtek and Driver Provider is Realtek Semiconductor Corp.

Based on some searching, it seems that this isn’t strange behavior for these devices, albeit not one I’m familiar with.

I didn’t find your exact same device mentioned, but some similar ones. This one seems to have issues with how the card is managed by the kernel and provides some good explanations but isn’t an accepted answer and has no comments, so I’m not sure of the ultimate solution or whether or not it’s still relevant three years later:
https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/367927/why-does-no-sound-play-with-realtek-alc260-driver-in-debian

This one might be able to get you to a solution if it applies (more than one codec on the same card), but it’s very dense for someone new to Linux.

https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=186476

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Thanks for looking a solution for me! I did come across both those threads while troubleshooting. They sound arcane to me so chances are I won’t be attempting to resolve this issue. :laughing:

It’s no big deal. It’s a miracle what lubuntu did to this 13 year old computer! It runs so well and it’s faster than XP! Firefox at the latest version!

Too bad hardware manufacturers make it so difficult to get drivers for linux.

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