I installed Ubuntu 14.04 on a computer with a Gigabyte GA-990FXA-UD3 (rev 1.0) motherboard. This motherboard has a Realtek ALC889 "HD Audio" chip. However, the volume control only shows "Dummy Output" and I do not hear any sound.
When I run lspci, the output includes the following line:
00:14.2 Audio device: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] SBx00 Azalia (Intel HDA) (rev 40)
When I run find /lib/modules/`uname -r` | grep snd, I see lines for a number of codecs, including /lib/modules/3.13.0-29-generic/kernel/sound/pci/hda/snd-hda-codec-realtek.ko, which I would have thought is the correct one. modprobe -c | grep realtek shows that this codec is loaded.
I was going to try installing the generic Realtek HD Audio driver, but I don't want to mess things up if there's a better way.
If it matters, I am using XFCE instead of Unity.
I found that trying to run
aplay -l(as suggested in other places) returns the following message:aplay: device_list:268: no soundcards found...A Google search for that text found this answer which solved my problem.