Linux and the Lenovo 3000 N200

Seven months ago I saw an ad in the newspaper for the economically priced, feature rich IBM Lenovo 3000 N200. Excited by the idea of owning a laptop, I made my most expensive impulse purchase to date. The laptop came pre-installed with Vista Home Basic which was painful to use considering the meagre 512MB of RAM included. After popping in an addition 1GB, Vista was definitely much more responsive. 

After sorting out the Windows portion of of things, I turned my attention to Linux. I had previously had Ubuntu dual booted with XP on my pc, which I had by now already sold to recoup some of the cash for the laptop. Ubuntu had worked like a charm on my pc without any hitches and I expected the same on my laptop. 

I gave Gutsy Gibbon a go only to discover that not a squeak was to be heard. Many hours of research into the sound issue led me to this thread on the Ubuntu forums. The suggested solution (which had worked for other people with the same laptop) was to edit the alsa-base file: 

sudo edit /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base

and add the following line to the end of the file: 

options snd-hda-intel model=lenovo

Upon reboot I was met with a sharp white noise from the speakers. Booting from the Ubuntu cd, I removed the added line in the alsa-base file to return my laptop to silence. I eagerly awaited the next release of Ubuntu in May, to see if the problem would be fixed with an out-of-the-box install. 

Sadly this was not to be, and I decided to try out other distros. Ubuntu Ultimate, Opensuse and Fedora all left me without any positive results. Then a good Samaritan was kind enough to give me a copy of Mandriva 2008.1 (Free). That too, on initial install was speechless, but with a minor tweak regained the power of sound. Adding this line: 

options snd-hda-intel enable=1 index=0 model=lenovo

to the end of the /etc/modprobe.conf file did the trick upon restart. After using Mandriva for a couple of days, I think I stumbled upon the solution to the white noise problem in Ubuntu (haven't tested my theory out yet). I normally use headphones to listen to music on my laptop while working. I also have the microphone cable plugged in even though I rarely use the microphone. When removing the headphone and microphone cable (in any order) a white noise would start on Mandriva similar to the Ubuntu noise at start up, after removing the second cable. 

Tweaking the mixer settings led to the cause - the front microphone boost on the output tab. This could possibly be the problem in Ubuntu, because when faced with a no-sound issue you are advised to enable everything in the mixer and set at maximum volume. 

A little off topic - the wireless LAN on Madriva 2008.1 does not work on initial install. Download the microcode image for your hardware from here, untar (extract), and copy the ucode file into the /lib/firmware folder. Wireless LAN should be functional on reboot.