Configuring Lenovo 3000 N100 sound card on Linux

I just got a new Lenovo Laptop, the Lenovo 3000 N100 0768-FSG to be exact. I installed SUSE 10.2, and also played around with a Ubuntu 7.04 live cd - neither of which recognized the sound-card. Actually, the sound card was recognized, and configured with the snd-hda-intel driver - but the speakers simply didn't work, neither did headphones.

I solved this in SUSE 10.2 by manually updating the ALSA drivers from the bundled 1.0.14 version to the 1.0.15rc3 development version - this required manual compilation, and installing my distributions kernel source package. The latest ALSA drivers can be found at www.alsa-project.org.

Instructions for installing the latest ALSA drivers from source can be found here, you will only need the alsa-driver package to get the sound working on your laptop, the rest of the packages should have been bundled with your linux distribution and do not require updating.

There are several sites that report getting the sound to work by adding one of the following lines to /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base:
options snd-hda-intel model=auto
options snd-hda-intel model=lenovo
options snd-hda-intel model=laptop-eapd
options snd-hda-intel model=3stack
And then restarting the sound module. Different lines seem to work for different ALSA versions, and different Lenovo 3000 or other intel powered laptop models. so you might want to try some of these before installing the development drivers.

In SUSE this can also be accomplished by running YaST -> Hardware -> Sound, selcting your sound card and clicking "Edit" you will be able to set the mode option to any of the above there.

UPDATE: On open SuSE 10.3, the sound card works out of the box!