Installed on Toshiba Encore 8" tablet no sound

I installed Retrowave on my Toshiba tablet. It formerly had Win 10 and I wiped the HD and reformatted when installing Elive Retrowave. So far it is going surpisingly well. My issue is there is no sound. It does not seem to recognize the soundcard. I ran sudo apt upgrade to see if it would pick up drivers but no luck. Any suggestions? Screen rotate also does not work but that is not surprising since i is likely not a very common use case.

I suspect your tablet has a certain Intel Broadwell-U audio chip that requires 'snd_hda_intel' like my Helix2 has.
If that's the case: Alas no solution, the firmware is old and doesn't work any more since of 2022.
Installing a Buster based version will work or either Ubuntu 22.04 IIRC....providing you don't upgrade the kernel.
Downgrading the kernel does not work either, the firmware doesn't load correctly. :worried:

  • Note: Other than that, sound works fine over i.e bluetooth. :slight_smile:

Do a search here on the forum for Helix and you'll find quite a few options.

For (auto-)rotation there are quite a few simple solutions as well. Again do search here for 'rotate'. :innocent:

@triantares could be good if that firmware issue is fixed in next trixie builds :thinking:

It's a Debian issue.
I just installed Ubuntu 25.05 on my Helix2 and discovered that there the sound does work, albeit it has to be cranked up to above 100% to be even audible.

The trixie or bookworm versions only show 'dummy output' as a configuration .... so no joy there. :face_with_head_bandage:

Well, Elive uses debian but we can still -maybe- make it working. Elive sometimes includes some extra firmwares to improve hardware compatibility

Could be good to know "what they changed" in ubuntu to make it working, try to copy the entire /lib/firmware directory to the elive one (but make a backup / move the original one, so that will only be a test) and reboot to see if it works

Live isos of ubuntu can be a good thing for fast betatestings of hardware like this case

Note that there should be a bug in debian reported about this issue :thinking:

Did you* tried the tool "elive-bug-report" ? it also features the debian bugs (but i think that can be improved)

The trixie or bookworm versions only show 'dummy output' as a configuration .... so no joy there. :face_with_head_bandage:

Any message in the "dmesg" about a missing firmware ? :thinking:

dmesg | grep -i firmware

It's not the firmware itself but how it's applied. We've been through this extensively before:
https://forum.elivelinux.org/t/installing-3-8-43-to-a-thinkpad-helix2-tablet-not-really-going-well

where we found out out that up to Ubuntu 22.04 it all worked (sort off) and later versions it didn't.....nowhere.

I installed Ubuntu Unity 25.04 to see what touch-capabilities were available (not much actually) for the touch-screen and discovered the audio card did work if set extremely loud.
I ran 3.8.50 live but as always: Dummy output. :worried:

I don't have access to the tablet today but will check during the weekend.

On the ubuntu machine none (regarding to sound) whatsoever ...... the list is very short there.

When running Elive 3.8.50 ..... a whole load in regard to 'snd' and the main diff I can see with 'inxi -A' is that Ubuntu is running a 7.0.0-14 kernel and PulseAudio is version 17.0 whereas Elive is running PA v. 16 and the 6.11 kernel.

Methinks waiting out on the Trixie based Elive (with 7.0 kernel) might be a good idea.

  • Of course I could install 3.8.49 and upgrade to Trixie base on that machine but have my doubts if that is "clean" enough to rebuild all module and firmware loading.
  • Especially keeping in mind that "downgrading' didn't work in our previous experiments, in regard to moving from Bullseye to Bookworm and back, to get the audio working (on a side note: I think we lost @yoda there) .... on that machine.
  • On top (I mentioned this in the other thread) this Thinkpad Helix2 has such awful hardware speakers that I prefer using an external BT soundbar. :grimacing:

It depends how far away the Trixie based version is (3.8.60?) especially also because the 7.0+ kernel requires more room in '/boot' and ..... manually resizing the that partition is fraught with ugly traps.