Written on June 19, 2021

I recently took the plunge and got a very nice Dell XPS 17 9700 with the intention to dual boot Windows 10 and Ubuntu 20.04. This all worked quite well – except audio.

There are numerous posts about this which can be found by googling this issue. I tried many of them, but finally found one that worked.

The root issue is that the kernel which comes with 20.04 does not include drivers (or they are not configured properly) to handle the audio devices in the XPS 17.

In testing I found that the linux-oem-20.04 package brought the speakers back to life, but not the mic.

sudo apt-install linux-oem-20.04

I found that the linux-image-5.6.0-1056-oem package brought the speakers AND mic back to life.

sudo apt install linux-image-5.6.0-1056-oem  linux-tools-5.6.0-1056-oem

To uninstall either use apt purge like this:

sudo apt purge 'linux*5.6.0*'

As you are rebooting, you can enter advanced options for ubuntu and select the kernel to test.

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As an aside, I also followed these directions:

https://github.com/stukev/XPS-17-9700-Ubuntu-Soundfix

I am not sure if they had any effect or not. I do know that on the 5.10 kernel which comes with linux-oem-20.04, it did not help. On the 5.11 kernel, it also did not help. Not sure if the effect of running it helped on 5.6 or not.