Hi.

My soundcard (an onboard intel) has all of a sudden stopped working. It detects it properly still, my alsamixer is set up correctly, yet I get no sound... does anyone know of this bug? how cna it be fixed?
thank you

I doubt that the soundcard has anything wrong with it; it's probably some conflict of applications. Try

as root and see if that fixes it. If you have esd running, you might restart that, too. Those are two things that have SOMETIMES fixed sound problems for me.

I seem to have a similar problem. I installed Mandrake 10.0 about a month ago, and the sound card set up with no problem. Yesterday I downloaded and installed Skype-1.0.0.7, and when I went to try it out, I realized that I no longer had sound. I have a PCI sound card, identified as Aureal Semiconductor ‎Vortex 2, using ‎the snd-au8830 module.

Here is an excerpt from dmesg:

vortex: ac97 codec stuck busy
AC'97 0 does not respond - RESET
vortex: ac97 codec stuck busy
AC'97 0 access is not valid [0xffffffff], removing mixer.
Vortex: hardware shutdown...vortex: ResManager: type 3 FATAL
vortex: ResManager: type 3 FATAL
vortex_adb_delroutes: route not found!
src alarm
vortex: ResManager: type 2 FATAL
vortex_adb_delroutes: route not found!
vortex: ResManager: type 3 FATAL
vortex_adb_delroutes: route not found!
src alarm
done.
au8830: probe of 0000:00:0b.0 failed with error -5
mtrr: 0xe0000000,0x2000000 overlaps existing 0xe0000000,0x1000000

Unfortunately, I don't know how to interpret it to figure out what is going wrong.

Also, I seem to have no /dev/dsp , which seems unusual.

Running alsactl restore gives the message "No soundcards found."

I will be glad for any help in solving this problem.. Thanks.

You've probably already thought of this, but just in case... Have you gone to the Mandrake Control Center and detected hardware and looked at the listing there? Also, have you got automatic hardware detection at boot enabled? (If not, you can enable it under System > Services in the Control Center.)

That's all I can think of right now to suggest...

If your sound card used to work, it should still be detected and work unless something has killed it. I hope that's not the case!

Yes to both questions. The Control Center is where I found the information on how the card was identified and what driver it was using.

I am reasonably sure the errors I get at boot time are telling me something needs to be fixed, but I am not sure what (vortex: ac97 codec stuck busy, etc.) I searched for this on Google, but didn't find anything except what looked like a few pages of code.

Well, I attempted a reply and Firefox crashed when I pushed the "Submit Reply" button.

So I'll type it all again and hope Firefox cooperates.

I think the next thing I'd do would be to reboot and from a console (not an X session) see how the volume settings are set using amixer (see man amixer) and then when sure the volume isn't set to zero, I'd try to play a sound file (.wav probably) using aplayer or just the play command.

That would be a start. If the sound played, you'd know your sound card's OK, which I'm 99% certain it is. Then you could try to find the source of the trouble by a process of elimination, loading one thing at a time till the sound fails in an X session.

Worth a try, anyway. OK, I'm about to push the button...