Am i screwed ofr sound?
 

Hello

i have an ECS RS485M-M mobo

the drivers on ECS website are only for versions of windows.

am i screwed or is there a way around this (other than buying a sound card)

Your system has an AC'97 audio codec from Realtek. Alsa supports those, just maybe not your system directly. You should post your system stats to the alsa-devel mailing list or file a bug on alsa-project.org.

or install sndconfig and run it as root to get [ including testing ] a working driver. this will even configure the sound server for the system if sndconfig recognises the audio chipset which it should, the ac97 [ cmedia is another name commonly used for this chipset ] is a fairly old one so every linux distro has drivers for it installed.

My new hardware, a dual core 64 bit system has the ac97 / cmedia chipset on it.
[ yet sndconfig didn't recognise it when I tested it. ]

still no sound

i found out about a utility called alsa, which i downloaded

i ran alsaconf and this launched a configuration program

it detected my AC'97 sound card

it auto configured it and said it was all set up and ready to use and told me to try it out with a mixer program.

I still have no sound :(

my volume is not muted and my speakers are on etc

any ideas

(im a newb be nice :))

Try executing alsamixer from the command line to unmute everything.

still no sound im afraid

When you executed the command alsamixer, what happened?

Anybody got any ideas on how to get my sound going?

When i excecuted alsamixer it brought up an ASCII based volume control interface, some of the levels had MM on them obviously indicating these were muted, i pressed the M key to unmute them but it was only the Microphone and Internal PC speaker anyway so it wouldnt make a difference. Still sat in silence

Are your audio drivers loaded? If you don't know post the output of lsmod.