How to enable surround 5.1 output on laptop

[Marko Vojinovic]

On Wednesday 09 December 2009 21:53:51 Major Péter wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I have a Dell Inspiron 1525 laptop, which has two headphone output and
> one mic input, see picture:
> http://images.techtree.com/ttimages/story/87259_frontcombo.jpg
> 
> On my winxp, I can do, that the left jack goes to the front speakers,
> the center jack goes to the center speaker, and the right jack goes to
> the rear speakers and everything works great.
> But on Linux I can't even make work the second headphone jack. :(
> What should I do to enable 5.1 on Fedora too?

>From http://www.pulseaudio.org/wiki/FAQ :

<quote>
I have a surround sound card, but PulseAudio uses just the front speakers!

Many people have a surround card, but have speakers for just two channels, so 
PulseAudio can't really default to a surround setup. To enable all the 
channels, edit /etc/pulse/daemon.conf: uncomment the default-sample-channels 
line (i.e. remove the semicolon from the beginning of the line) and set the 
value to 6 if you have a 5.1 setup, or 8 if you have 7.1 setup etc. After 
doing the edit, restart pulseaudio.
</quote>

Never tried it myself, but guess that should do it. :-)

HTH, :-)
Marko