ever have trouble with headphone recognition?

[Jeff Vian]

On Tue, 2006-06-20 at 10:38 -0500, Paul Johnson wrote:
> This is a laptop computer.  I thought that was obvious when I said it
> is a laptop.  The built in speakers are not "plugged in" to the back.
> Did I mention this is a laptop?
> 
Sorry, I missed that ;-(( .  I was thinking desktop and overlooked the
system you said you had.
 
The rest of my suggestion still applies. Have you tried some of the many
controls in alsa that are not enabled by default on most systems?  The
"external amplifier" switch may be even more critical in your case. 

> pj
> 
> On 6/20/06, Jeff Vian <jvian10 at charter.net> wrote:
> > On Mon, 2006-06-19 at 23:23 -0600, Paul Johnson wrote:
> > > I have a Dell Latitude D820 and in order to make sound work at all, I
> > > had to install the newer Alsa drivers & utilties as described on the
> > > RedHat help site.
> > > http://people.redhat.com/stransky/alsa/
> > >
> > > This laptop has an Intel southbridge architecture that uses the driver
> > > snd-hda-intel.
> > >
> > > Here is the problem.  If the laptop starts and no headphones are
> > > plugged in, then inserting the headphones does nothing--sound keeps
> > > coming out from speakers.
> > >
> > > Conversely, if  I put in the headphones before starting the comptuer,
> > > then the headphones do work, but yanking them does not make the
> > > speakers work.
> > >
> > I am not sure what you mean here about speakers and headphones.  On my
> > systems the speakers (front/stereo) plug into the same jack as the
> > headphones on the rear.  If the speakers work then the headphones will
> > work.
> >
> > If, on the other hand, you are using the speakers in the rear jack and
> > plugging the headphones in the front jack then this may be an issue with
> > the way the front panel audio is connected to the audio ports on the
> > mobo.  With a front panel properly connected it should not matter.  The
> > front panel jack will disable the rear jack when plugged in, but should
> > never depend on which is connected at boot time to determine which is
> > enabled.
> >
> > > The alsa mixer does not show the headphones device, at all. None of
> > > the gnome mixer tools   or kde mixer tools show more devices.
> > >
> > Nothing I know of explicitly lists the headphone device.  It is after
> > all a speaker set and plugs into the same jack on the sound card.
> > Some have had problems with the external speakers never working.
> >
> > One thing I have found and has been repeated here by many is that there
> > is an "external amplifier" switch in the alsa volume control panel.
> > Sometimes this is off and the speakers will not work so turning it on
> > enables the speakers. This does not seem to be what you describe
> > however.
> >
> > >From reading the way you describe it I suspect the problem with cabling
> > for the front panel audio, but only you can answer that.
> >
> > > I've stumbled throught a lot of Alsa documentation and there is a hint
> > > that specifying the model= option in  modules.conf might help, but I
> > > don't understand the jargon for figuring out what model I have.  They
> > > offer weird names like "3stack" and such.  Do you know what model to
> > > use?  Here's all the info I have:
> > >