Ubuntu – 18.04.4 no sound “dumthe output”

aceralsasoundcard

Running Ubuntu 18.04.4 on an Acer Swift 5 (SF514-54T)

I was trying to fix the fact that the microphone was not working and now I cannot even have any sound coming out. Instead, the sound settings only show "Dummy Output" instead of a soundcard.

I tried the following, but nothing worked.

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Best Answer

It seems that the problem was the update to Ubuntu kernel 5.3.0-42-generic which has been recently reported as a bug.

Reverting to the previous kernel 5.3.0-40-generic should solve the problem.

To see what version kernel you are running type in the terminal:

uname -r

You can boot to the previous kernel by selecting the relevant option in the grub2 boot loader. Once in the grub2 menu, select "Advanced options for Ubuntu" and then choose "5.3.0-40-generic".

If the grub2 menu does not appear, press ESC or (left) SHIFT while booting.

If pressing these keys does not work to bring up the grub2 menu, you need to manually edit the boot loader settings. This can be done by e.g. tweaking the grub.cfg file using a text editor (in this case gedit):

sudo gedit /boot/grub/grub.cfg

Search for "timeout" and change the following to:

set timeout_style=menu
set timeout=10

and save the grub.cfg file. Next time you boot, the grub2 menu should appear.

I reckon that there must be more elegant solutions until the bug is fixed but, for the moment, this did the trick for me.

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