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did you go here: www.alsa-project.org and follow the directions for your sound card? It takes more than just installing the packages they give you. And in my opinion alsa sounds much better than oss.
The reason i'm goin for Alsa is because of all the talk about alsa sounding better than OSS...but i did go to alsa-project.org....
that is one of the reasons i'm doing this thread.....i need to know what i'm doing wrong...i know someone in LQ can help me....my original questions still stand....what did i do wrong???
Are you saying you don't have sound even after entering 'aumix' (w/out quotes) at the console, and adjusting the volume? Aumix defaults to muting all channels. Check that first because you may have already solved the problem
Well, it looks like Alsa is not being loaded in whatever init script Mandrake uses to load things. In Slackware, /etc/rc.d/rc.M runs another script called rc.alsa, which loads the appropriate drivers. I have no idea how mandrake init works - it's different than Slackware. It may be as simple as commenting out the calls to the OSS drivers in the appropriate init script and calling the alsa ones, but I would suggest finding an example of how this is done in Mandrake. Alsa is very popular, so it should not be difficult to find this information. If there is an RPM for installing Alsa, it may do the script modificatins for you - something to consider. If you installed Alsa from source, no telling if the script mods were done.
If you successfully get Alsa drivers to load, there is another thing you need to do:
Run 'alsamixer' from the command line. You can run it as your normal user. It will run a mixer that you can unmute and adjust volumes on any channels you need. There will be a lot of channels, so you will have to arrow key to the right to see all of them, and use the 'm' key to unmute the channels you need. After you have done that, run, as root, 'alsactl store.' This will store the setting you just made. If you STILL don't have sound, I will need to know the gui you are using (kde/gnome, etc) so I can help you with the sound settings there, if need be.
Thanks for the input..i'm gonna try it all...thanks
fyi: installed the alsa driver from the terminal...so i don't know if mandrake is the problem...although it didn't recognize the inboard sound card after installation
tried to download alsaconf and it hung the other night...will try again, can't seem to find it in the rpms
i am gonna try to run alsamixer from the command line....
thanks for your help....the answer was a dumb one...when i brought the computer in to the dealer to ask about a usb problem, they disabled the ac97 sound....now it's on auto and everything is working...
dumb dumb dumb...i appreciate your help....
quess what...now everything is working on my linux box ...Yaaaaaaaaayyy
If anyone has troubles with your sound try this, this is how I finally got my AC97 working.
Make sure you run alsamixer, then alsactl store to save the alsamixer settings.
When configuring alsamixer, make sure you unmute each thing as well as turning the volume up. I spent hours trying to work out what was wrong and all I had to do was unmute it (pressing '<' & '>').
Also, if your sound comes out staticy, try turning PCM (in alsamixer) down a bit, and if your sound sounds really weird, like only one channel working etc, try turing down 3D control - depth (in alsamixer), it solved it for me.
Also, you might need to get ALSA lib and ALSA utils. Im not sure if they I already had them, but sound worked after I installed them and ran alsamixer.
I'm having a slightly different problem with my ac97 soundcard...
It install perfectly, but if I run a program which sends output to the pcm channel, every once in a while I get some sort of static noise out of my speakers, which can be muted by muting the pcm channel.
I've tried updated drivers, different settings, and have spent several hours on this and other forums, but I couldn't find any other solution.
Does anybody have a useful suggestion?
I'm running SuSE 9.0 (KDE3.1) on a PIII800EB
MB: AOpen AX33, with onboard sound (VT82C686 AC97)
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