Hi, I have two soundcards, an onboard one and a SB PCI card and I would like to be able to use the SB instead of the onboard one that Mandrake chooses for me. Would anyone know how I would go about doing this? Oh, I am using Mandrake 10 and kernal 2.4.25

Thanks in advance

if the sb drivers were already in the kernel, i would just rmmod the old drivers and modprobe the sb ones. then i'd rerun alsaconf and see if that worked. next time i rebooted i'd disable the onboard sound in the bios, and also take out any old drivers that were autoloading at startup, add the new ones, etc.

Sorry, but most of that was gibberish to me How would I find out if the drivers are in the kernal? I have tried disabling the onboard soundcard but that dosn't work. from what I can see, it seems that both soundcards have been detected, the SB using the snd-ens1371 which from what I've picked up from a google search is the right driver for the card.

okay, as root try to load the SB driver by doing:

# modprobe snd-ens1371

if you're using a stock kernel it might already be there, it's just a question of modprobing it. if the modprobe fails ("can't locate module snd-ens1371") that likely means it wasn't compiled into your kernel and you'll have to recompile the kernel selecting that as an option.

at some point it would probably be a good idea to disable the sound drivers for your onboard sound. for that, do lsmod, which will return a list of what modules are loaded. you'll have to know which one it is, and then remove it with rmmod:

# rmmod name-of-driver

once you're sure you've got the right drivers loaded with modprobe and the old ones removed with rmmod, run the alsaconfig command to reset alsa to recognize your new sound setup. that should write the changes to some config file so you won't have to do it every time (if it's OSS, i'm not sure what you do at that point, i think maybe OSS must handle it on the fly somehow. i never had to mess with any config files or anything when i used OSS, at least). however, note that if you simply rmmod the module, it will just load again the next time you reboot. so you'll have to take care of that in the config files.

i'm not sure what config file it is in mandrake, but i think it's /etc/modules.conf. look around in there, and if you see the name-of-driver you took out with rmmod, just comment that out and replace it with snd-ens1371 to load those drivers at boot instead. if that's not the file, look around in /etc/ and some of the subdirectories for any file that has "modules" in the name, or maybe a mandrake user will chime in with what file it is.

finally, make sure the onboard sound is turned off in the BIOS (don't forget to save changes when exiting). if it's turned off there, i can't understand how it would be able to work. in fact, based on my limited knowledge, i'd say that would have to be impossible.

hope that helps.

Cheers for your very detailed and informative reply, it did the job and now I'm running my soundblaster! It's been a year since I installed Mandrake on my computer, and now I think everything is finally working as it should

great! glad to help out. congratulations.