I have what I assume is an ISA Plug 'n Pray Creative Soundblaster AWE 64 card.

My Fedora Core 2 kernel detects the card at boot-up:

isapnp: Scanning for PnP cards...
pnp: SB audio device quirk - increasing port range
pnp: AWE32 quirk - adding two ports
isapnp: Card 'Creative SB AWE64 PnP'
isapnp: 1 Plug & Play card detected total

but the Sound Card Detection wizard (system-config-soundcard) does not detect any cards.

If I manually load snd-sbawe using modprobe, system-config-soundcard still does not see any sound cards, but programs like xmms stop complaining about there being no sound card.

After 'modprobe snd-sbawe', I see the following in /proc/asound/oss/sndstat:

Kernel: Linux gimli 2.6.5-1.358custom #3 Thu Jun 3 09:38:41 PDT 2004 i686
Config options: 0

Installed drivers:
Type 10: ALSA emulation

Card config:
Sound Blaster 16 at 0x220, irq 5, dma 1&5

Audio devices: NOT ENABLED IN CONFIG

Synth devices: NOT ENABLED IN CONFIG

Midi devices:
0: Sound Blaster 16 MIDI

Timers:
7: system timer

Mixers:
0: CTL1745

At this point, I can run amixer and it sees the card and all is fine.
However, if I try to write to /dev/dsp (using xmms, aplay, cat etc.), none of which complain about the sound card in any way, my system just freezes up completely and I have to powercycle.

My custom kernel has only been changed for one thing - to add support for CONFIG_IDEDISK_STROKE (I have an old Award BIOS and my boot disk is 120GB). All the sound options were set at the default. The machine is an old 400MHz Pentium II with 128MB mem.

I have tried putting various things in modprobe.conf that I have found by googling, none of which have changed the behavior in any way - fedora still freezes up when I try to write to /dev/dsp.

Right now I have booted up with only 'alias sound-slot-0 snd-sbawe' in modprobe.conf (plus the stuff for other modules).

Other info:
#cat /proc/asound/version
Advanced Linux Sound Architecture Driver Version 1.0.4rc2 (Tue Mar 30 08:19:30 2004 UTC).
Compiled on May 31 2004 for kernel 2.6.5-1.358custom.

# cat /proc/asound/cards
0 [S16 ]: SB AWE - Sound Blaster 16
Sound Blaster 16 at 0x220, irq 5, dma 1&5

# cat /proc/asound/devices
0: [0- 0]: ctl
4: [0- 0]: hardware dependent
8: [0- 0]: raw midi
16: [0- 0]: digital audio playback
24: [0- 0]: digital audio capture
33: : timer

# cat /proc/asound/hwdep
00-00: OPL3 FM

# cat /proc/asound/pcm
00-00: SB16 DSP : DSP v4.16 : playback 1 : capture 1

I had this card working previously under Windows and FreeBSD so I assume it is a config/driver problem and not a hardware problem.

I don't see any conflicts in /proc/interrupts, /proc/dma or /proc/ioports. (Only the SB is on IRQ 5 and dma 1&5, and the IO port range is reported as "0220-022f : SoundBlaster" in /proc/ioports).

Any ideas on why my system is freezing up, and what I might be able to put in modprobe.conf to stop that happening? Or how I can debug it further?

I am having similar problems -- system-config-sound doesn't recognize my awe64 card, so I have to load the modules manually. The only substantial difference is that /proc/asound/oss/sndstat has the lines:

Audio devices:
0: DSP v4.16 (DUPLEX)

Instead of your
Audio devices: NOT ENABLED IN CONFIG

I discovered that the reason I wasn't hearing anything after `modprobe snd-sbawe` was that the volume was down. (I did hear stuff instead of crashing)

This doesn't solve your problem... But we're in similar enough situations that I thought maybe this would be useful.

Just in case it helps, here is lsmod | grep snd

apsnd_sbawe 28480 1
snd_opl3_lib 11648 1 snd_sbawe
snd_sb16_dsp 12288 1 snd_sbawe
snd_sb16_csp 20992 1 snd_sbawe
snd_sb_common 16512 3 snd_sbawe,snd_sb16_dsp,snd_sb16_csp
snd_hwdep 10372 2 snd_opl3_lib,snd_sb16_csp
snd_mpu401_uart 9088 1 snd_sbawe
snd_rawmidi 21792 1 snd_mpu401_uart
snd_seq_device 10120 3 snd_sbawe,snd_opl3_lib,snd_rawmidi
snd_pcm_oss 45220 0
snd_pcm 76420 2 snd_sb16_dsp,snd_pcm_oss
snd_page_alloc 12036 1 snd_pcm
snd_timer 22404 2 snd_opl3_lib,snd_pcm
snd_mixer_oss 17792 1 snd_pcm_oss
snd 43876 20 snd_sbawe,snd_opl3_lib,snd_sb16_dsp,snd_sb16_csp,snd_sb_common,snd_hwdep,snd_mpu401_uart,snd_rawmidi ,snd_seq_device,snd_pcm_oss,snd_pcm,snd_timer,snd_mixer_oss
soundcore 10336 1 snd

maybe one of those is different on your system...

ap