No sound and 'Dummy Output' in Ubuntu 14.04

Question

I'm running a dell XPS 13 (developers edition). I had Ubuntu 14.04 from the beginning and for about 2 months everything was working great. After a while, sometimes when i had my earplugs plugged in, the sound suddenly stopped, but after a restart it was ok. 2 weeks ago, restart didn't fix it so i had to sudo alsa force-reload or to reinstall it

sudo apt-get remove --purge alsa-base pulseaudio

sudo apt-get install alsa-base pulseaudio

Everytime i restarted i had to do one of 2 things above in order to have sound. 15 days ago it started showing 'dummy output' and nothing can be done. I tried all the recommended ways i found: 1. update kernel 2. Open the terminal and edit speech-dispatcher file by using the following command: sudo gedit /etc/default/speech-dispatcher and change RUN=yes to RUN=no 3. running sudo nano /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf and adding

options snd-hda-intel probe_mask=1 model=dell-laptop
also tried model=dell-m23 and dell-m82 and dell-bios

but nothing happened. Then i tried options snd-hda-intel probe_mask=1 model=auto and it seemed to fix the problem but the next day had the dummy output again. i'd had to sudo alsa force-reload a couple of times, restart and the sound would come back again. Now not even this works.

Some information

sudo aplay -l gives

**** List of PLAYBACK Hardware Devices ****
card 0: HDMI [HDA Intel HDMI], device 3: HDMI 0 [HDMI 0]
  Subdevices: 1/1
  Subdevice #0: subdevice #0

cat /proc/asound/card0/codec* | grep Codec gives

Codec: Intel Haswell HDMI

Any ideas?

Solution

I experienced a similar problem. In my case speech-dispatcher was not installed, but that doesn't seem to be the case for you. I recommend running:

sudo apt-get install alsa-base alsa-utils alsa-tools libasound2 libasound2-plugins

this will ensure that all the necessary packages are installed. Follow this with:

sudo alsa force-reload

to reload your alsa settings.

Comments

[Dimitris Ktistakis]

I already had tried your solution, and did it again just in case. It didn't work.