No sound after installing ALSA

Vitalie Ciubotaru · 03-09-2006, 09:13 AM

I've got the same problem as logicalfuzz in his/her thread.
I am in the mid-way of having ALSA in place on my (B)LFS 6.1. I installed ALSA-lib, ALSA-plugins, ALSA-utils. When I tried to configure the utils with alsaconf it says something like

Quote:

#alsaconf
modinfo : could not find module snd
...
which : dialog not found
which : whiptail not found
Error, dialog or whiptail not found.

"which" seems to be in place, but I can't understand what dialog and whiptail are (neither LFS nor BLFS indexes contain anything alike). BTW, lspci lists my AC97 on-board sound "card"

Quote:

#lspci
...
... Multimedia audio controller: VIA VT82C686A (rev 10)...

no unknown things listed, so LFS found my soundcard.
I tried to recompile the kernel without any modules - no changes.

PTrenholme · 03-09-2006, 10:14 AM

In Fedora, and, I suspect, any system using ALSA, you need to define the sound driver in /etc/modprobe.conf

Code:

# ALSA portion
alias char-major-116 snd
alias snd-card-0 snd-<your driver name>
# OSS/Free portion
alias char-major-14 soundcore
# card #1
alias sound-service-0-0 snd-mixer-oss
alias sound-service-0-1 snd-seq-oss
alias sound-service-0-3 snd-pcm-oss
alias sound-service-0-8 snd-seq-oss
alias sound-service-0-12 snd-pcm-oss

Also (again, on Fedora, but I suspect others) ALSA initially defaults to all sound muted. Check /etc/asound.state for the ALSA device states and levels. (Those are usually set by amixer, but, without the dialog tools, I think amixer won't work very well.)

Vitalie Ciubotaru · 03-09-2006, 08:56 PM

PTrenholme, thank you for the information above (and below - I edited this after you posted the quote on whiptail).
I consulted the modprobe.conf on my Fedora Core 3, which produces sound with no problem, and think that the problem is not in this file. My FC3 finds the soundcard and creates devices (pcmC0D0c, PCMC0D0p, timer and smth else) in /dev/snd directory, while LFS creates similar devices in /dev directory.
Can this be the reason why my ALSA doesn't find them?

PTrenholme · 03-10-2006, 08:39 AM

From a quick Google for whiptail: At RPMFind

Quote:

Dialog compliant utility that allows you to build user interfaces in a TTY (text mode only). You can call dialog from within a shell script to ask the user questions or present with choices in a more user friendly manner.

Dialog (and gdialog) are similar "window on terminal" display programs.

Vitalie Ciubotaru · 03-11-2006, 04:23 AM

Thank you once again.
I found dialog on my Fedora Core 3 and read the manual to it (now I see that whiptail is the same thing). I simply copied the executable (don't know how wise it is) from /usr/bin of FC3 to /usr/bin of LFS. Now alsaconf doesn't complain about dialog/whiptail, but still produces error (it can't find my card/device). The same is true, for example, for alsamixer - it says it can't find the default card/device, but I do not know their names. Are they different from other distros?

PTrenholme · 03-11-2006, 07:30 AM

Assumption here -- I may be wrong -- but if you're doing LFS, don't you have to build your own sound driver? If so, it's wherever you put it, and called whatever you called it. I also suspect that you need to compile sound support into your kernel, and the source code -- or the LFS documentation -- should go into some detail about where the drivers are located and how to build them. (I also suspect that it tells you how to change those locations to suit yourself.)

Vitalie Ciubotaru · 03-12-2006, 10:17 AM

I am completely confused.
PTrenholme said I presumably "have to build [my] own sound driver". Stupid question, but still: what does the word "own" mean/imply?
I followed BLFS instructions and built ALSA Libraries, ALSA Plugins and ALSA Utilities (alsaconf, alsamixer and the like). I know that there is an ALSA Drivers package, but there's nothing about it in the BLFS documentation, so I did not build it.
PTrenholme suspects I "need to compile sound support into [my] kernel".
I still need additional comments on that.
I enabled sound support in my kernel, tried to enable/disable/modularize support for my sound card (which is specified above), I even tried to build it all as modules - no changes. I definitely didn't (re)assign any names and didn't move anything for the mere reason that the instructions do not say that.
Help!

Vitalie Ciubotaru · 03-15-2006, 10:28 AM

Thank you for your participation. However, I am stuck with this problem.

In order to get any further, I need structured answers to the following questions (if I'm mixing up things, please correct me):
1. The kernel. In order to get my soundcard (on-board, VIA686A chip based, AC97) working, shall I (re)build the kernel:
a) with sound support enabled or modularized?
b) with my type of soundcard enabled or modularized (or maybe disabled as the ALSA website suggests)?
c) other things enabled or modularized (and which namely)?
2. The ALSA package.
a) How can I find out that my operating system recognized (found) the soundcard, and its just ALSA that can't interact with it? In this case, it just has to be configured properly, right?
b) How is it configured?

If anyone encountered the same or similar problems, and solved them successfully, or just knows the answer to a particular question I posed please let me know.

Vitalie CIUBOTARU