Help with Sound Blaster Live on Red Hat 8.0
 

Hey everyone, I am new to these forums and it looked like a good place to ask for help. I recently installed red hat 8.0 on my computer along with windoze. Everything seems to be working fine, but I cannot get my sound blaster Live to even make a beep. It works with other distros, and windoze, but not for red hat. When i try sndconfig, it recognizes it and shows me the driver EMU10k1, but it wont play any sound at all. I am stumped and I would appreciate any help anyone could give me. And I am a Linux Newbie

Chuck,

I use soundblaster cards and I have to use a different output on the card when I use RH 8.0, MD, or Vector as opposed to WIN98.

Try plugging your speakers in a different output jack on the card.

I found this out purely by accident after going through many convolutions.

John

I tried doing that but it didnt work :( I wish it was something that easy. I use KDE and when I log in, I get an arts message saying:

Sound Server Informational Message: Error while init the
sound driver can't start sound i/o The sound
server will continue, using the Null output Device.

Have you heard of that? If so, I would appreciate a reply. Thanks in advance

Permissions?
 

I had this problem with KDE before, using Debian. I seem to remember it had something to do with permissions. Can't remember right now...sorry. I changed the permissions on the device using:
chmod
try:
man chmod
for more info about using this command.

Also, look for errors by doing:
dmesg | less

If you remember, I would appreciate the info :p . Also what device were you referring to? I know about chmod(kinda like windoze's attrib command). Also I couldnt run the command dmess(must be for debian). Anywhos thanks again for the help.

Alsamixer?
 

Might b worth running alsamixer and checking the volume for PCM is turned up. Not just the Master volume.

I think this message is telling you that the hardware configuration is not quite right. If you have plug and play enabled in the bios, I would go into BIOS at POST and disable it. Then you can try one of a couple of things. Shut down the system, remove the sound card and reboot. Kudzu should come up on reboot into linux asking if you want to remove the soundcard configuration. I would do so. Login, then shutdown again. Now reinstall the soundcard. Kudzu should come up again saying it has found new hardware asking if you would like to configure it, click OK and hopefully it will set it up correctly this time with plug and play disabled in the BIOS. The kudzu man pages may also prove quite helpful.

Going another way, what happens when you run the Soundcard Detection gui in System Settings? Mine says Vendor: ensonique
Model: 5880 AudioPCI, Module es1371.
If your card is similar, you should see something very similar. If not, the card has not been detected properly for some reason. Sometimes it's an IRQ issue in the BIOS or the Plug n Play being enabled. You may want to try insmod es1371 or insmod emu10k1.o. Also, you can use your windows hardware device manager to see what IRQ and I/O ranges the card is using there, they should work with linux too.


I will watch for your progress and try to help more if I can, good luck! Rickdog PS, looking at the RH HCL shows that the emu10k1.o module is the correct module, so once it is installed correctly, it should work.

I Agree
 

I too had a problem getting my SBLive to work in Redhat 8 and Mandrake 9 for that matter. After telling the BIOS "no" to Plug and PLay OS the card worked like a charm. Just for the record that was on an ASUS P4-B motherboard with a SB-Live Value card. Hope that helps.


Good Luck

i had that problem when i first installed Red Hat 8.0, and i found the problem to be the onboard sound was the default, and it wouldn't just use the soundblaster unless i turned off onboard sound in the BIOS.

I appreciate all of the suggestions everyone and I will give them a try(as soon as I get a chance since I have been working long hours latley). I did try removing the sound card the other day before posting here and reset it up with kudzo, but I will make sure my bios settings are turned off for plug and play. No loss since I dont use windoze anymore anyways :) . Again thanks and I will post again as soon as I try out your suggestions so maybe it can help someone else out.

Having plug n pray disabled in the bios prolongs installation for older windows versions but should not be a real big deal for your current installation, especially if most/all of your hardware is already installed.

Chuckeff

My Friend Asus P4-B has an on Board sound card called AC'97 Audio...Linux will recognize it differently but you must get rid of sound blaster...i had sound blaster and the only thing that caused me was trouble. not only in linux but also in windows. So what you can do is turn-off the machine, unplug sound blaster, restart and once you get to Kudzu hardware detection if you are prompted to remove sound blaster do it and it will work once desktop has recovered and the sound detection system recognizes the on-board sound card (try play sound once it finds it :))

well I tried all of the suggestions and still no sound. I uninstalled the sound card many times and still nothing. Turned off and on the plug and pray, tried the sound card that comes with the computer(disabled and enabled). It is odd that on my other computer, the sound blaster 64 worded pretty easily but I cannot get sound blaster live to work on this one(would have switched cards but the sb 64 is not PCI. So I have 3 options, switch to suse where the sound card worked, have no sound with my current setup, or find a cheap sound card for this boat anchor of mine and hopefully it will configure. Thanks again for the help, and if anyone knows of anything else to try, im all ears.

OK I uninstalled my sound card and I am still getting the error:

Informational ArtsMessage

Error while initializing the sound driver
Cant start I/O
The sound server will continue, using the Null Output Device

This is odd to me since I uninstalled the sound card, and deleted the old kudza settings. Any suggestions???

that was exactly my error msg chuck...i also have a soundblaster live however it is sblive value not sure if they are any diff...well i aswell don't have sound..though when i reinstalled redhat 8.0 and loaded the mp3 plugin the sound worked great until i rebooted and loaded some other hardware...maybe the hardware could be screwing something up for both of us..both of us should try booting up with only the essientials in the comp. b/c when i reinstalled linux i only had the essentials in. well good luck to you.

-Neo