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In Fedora 10, my HP dv-6 laptop did strange things with headphones.  If I plugged headphones in, the sound would continue to come out the speakers while also out the headphone jack.  In Fedora 11, sound no longer worked at all through the headphone jack.

Every once and a while I would Google search to find that this problem appears to consistently hit HP dv-5, dv-6, and dv-7 and some HP Mini’s that have AMD audio using the snd-hda-intel driver.

Today, I found a workaround, but it is not very fun.  Some have found a series of commands you can do to mute the speakers and unmute them as well as mute and unmute the headphone jack using hda-verb.

It worked, but the syntax is far from user-friendly or easy to remember.  So, I have packaged a fix, based on their source code that puts friendly scripts in /usr/bin.  It’s not a perfect workaround, but it works:

headphone-on   – Mutes the laptop speakers, and unmutes the headphone jacks.
headphone-off   – Mutes the headphone jacks, and unmutes the laptop speakers.

These need to be ran as root.  The next glorious step would be for alsa or hal to do this automagically, but in the meantime, us HP owners can watch HomestarRunner on our laptops in the library again with a single root command.

Get hda-hp RPMs and source here.

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