How to enable surround 5.1 output on laptop

[Richard Shaw]

2009/12/9 Marko Vojinovic <vvmarko at gmail.com>:
> 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. :-)

The only thing I would say about this advice is try the volume control
app in F11/12 which has the ability to set your speaker configuration
before you start editing conf files.

Richard