Ubuntu – No sound (speakers or jack) on ASUS ZenBook on Ubuntu 18

18.04asussound

I have bought a new ASUS ZenBook, installed Ubuntu (I'm new to it) and wipping out windows completely, and things work well apart from the sound.

WHAT HAPPENS
Basically I cannot get any sound out of the in-built speakers (harman / kardon), neither can I use the jack audio output.
Interestingly, if I connect in bluetooth to my home speakers it works well (is it a sound card in the speakers themselves?).

  • DETAILS I have tried a number of steps from what I read online:
    • ubuntu settings/sound
      –> speakers not mutted
      –> no mention of "dummy output" -> instead the device for sound output is "Speakers – Built-in Audio"
    • killall pulseaudio; rm -r ~/.config/pulse/* ; rm -r ~/.pulse* FOLLOWED BY pulseaudio -k
    • sudo alsa force-reload
    • reboot
    • alsamixer and check the master and speaker are not mutted
    • sudo gedit /etc/default/speech-dispatcher and try both run=yes and run=no (no difference after rebooting, so I switched back to the
      default which is no)

Here is the details about my configuration:
http://alsa-project.org/db/?f=b74bdb035c8a8582850374e6481ea6edc2f68f42

How should I approach the problem? I do not know where to start, or why this is so difficult.

Thanks for your help!
Romain

Best Answer

The sound now works!

Updating to Ubuntu 18.10 didn't work. But worked is one or both of the two concurrent steps I took:

  • disable secure boot

  • upgrade to Ubuntu 19.04 (thank you Bludzee!)

Bad news though: my computer now struggles to boot (actually it intermittently manages to boot by itself one time out of 6, it's pretty bad!)

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