Hello again and I apologize for the long post ahead of time,
I’ve been running Ubuntu on my Lenovo C930 for a couple of years now and I’ve been working with folks across various forums and sites to try to share workarounds to various issues we’ve faced when trying to run Ubuntu (or other popular distros) on this hardware.
Last year I had this thread: Unix Support on Lenovo C930? which had some helpful tips, but no success.
Ubuntu 20.04 has come out recently and a lot of the workarounds are no longer required (wifi, screen rotation, etc) as we have a recent kernel update with 5.3.0~ and pretty much everything is working out of the box except the following.
- Full Speaker Support
- Microphone (not the focus in this topic)
I love this laptop and I’m quite a big fan of Lenovo’s products as they have had a good track record with supporting Linux on some of their devices, but this particular model seems to fall short of expectations for it being a ‘premium’ model. (Yes, I know that this is not a ‘certified’ device, but I like to bitch and moan.)
I’m hoping to find some experts here that can assist me with figuring out the last steps to get the full functioning sound quality working under linux as you get running Windows on this device because it is pretty damn good for audio quality.
This device is a little different with the sound setup compared to other models as it has a 5.1 speaker configuration. It breaks down into the following bits:
- Front Left
- Front Center
- Front Left
- LFE in soundbar placed in hinge
- Rear Left on device bottom
- Rear Right on device bottom
Out of the box, only the sound bar produces a very ‘tinny’ sound, the other speakers don’t seem to produce any sound at all.
We have discovered a method to slightly improve the sound by using the alsa gui tool hdajackretask and mapping pin 0x17 to Dock Headphone to improve the quality slightly.
Others and I over at the Lenovo forums have had a long discussion open trying to debug this issue for months (years?) and we haven’t made progress. It seems that we’re stuck due to a lack of a bios update from Lenovo.
We’ve tried opening up a bug over at kernel.org and there have been other discussions and resources used which I’ll link below as they provide more context:
- Github Repo with general fixes and testing
- Kernel.org with really detailed notes and insights
- Alsa Mailing List
Anybody here willing to try to help out or could reach out to Lenovo via backdoor channels to have somebody internally look at this and patch it?
Any help is appreciated,
Thanks,
Geep