Hello

I am using an RH 8.0 kernel 2.4.18-14 Intel i810 ac97 on board soundcard on
compaq deskpro en series with problems as follows
It seems that after using some application with sound e.g browser the
soundcard stays hung on that app.
when going to kde control center and attempting to restart the sound server i
get the following message:
"Sound server informational message:
Error while initializing the sound driver:
device /dev/dsp can't be opened (Device or resource busy)
The sound server will continue, using the null output device."

and after there is no sound in the system at all.
looking at the system log i repeatedly found messages as follows:
"modprobe: Can't locate module sound-service-0-0"
"modprobe: Can't locate module sound-slot-1"
In the past i had RH 7.3 and used to get this error when starting kde
i have looked around an found numerous posts on this problem and variants of
it but no actual solution.
I tried alsa and didnt manage to get it working also i tried kernel 2.4.20 and
same problem

I have gone through 25 search pages of this forum and didnt fine any solution please help out
if you need anymore info id be happy to supply it
thank you

Everyone at the company i work at has the same problem. We all get the same PC's with the intel motherboard with the 82801DB AC97 sound.

We all run Redhat 8.0 and in order to get it to work, we had to back port the AC97 codec and the i810 audio modules from a pre release of the 2.4.21 kernel, where they actually fixed the problem.

I forget exactly which kernel version we compiled it against. I think it was 2.4.18-24.8....but once it was installed it worked just fine.

Jeff

thanks for the reply
there must be an easier way to solve this

anyone?

I hope I can help a bit. I had the same computer type (it died) with i810 and AC'97.

I never did figure out a consistent solution, but some of the messages here pointed to the idea of going to the /dev directory and there are several files there with names like dsp0, dsp1, dsp56k. More than once I changed the permission levels on these files based on other messages I had seen with a command like

chmod +666 dsp*

it seemed to help--can't remember if I had to re-boot or not after issuing that command

the other thing is to run the sndconfig utility (probably as root user). It will identify the device and should be able to re-initialize it for you. It was a nuisance having to run this every time my sound got "stuck" like yours is. One thing, I think sndconfig does not install as a regular feature of RH8, so you may have to install it.

I wish I could offer a more elegant solution, perhaps some of the more experienced users here can provide you with other ideas.

Cheers

thanks for replying but i dont think this is the problem because otherwise it would have said something like permission denied
i have looked around and found in my /proc/interrupts that the sound card shares an irq with my ethernet card, however when i try to change it in bios they both change to same irq al the time (very annoying compaq bios)
i havent found how to change irq in another way maybe someone can shed a litlle light to my problem here?

thanks

In order to get sound to work you need to the i810_audio and the ac97_codec to be installed. I have a Dell Optiplex GX 240 here at work and I had sound working with a standard install of my slackware 9.0. I have issues with direct calls to the DSP (eg gnomemeeting). Here is my module list

root@mikes1-3:~# lsmod
Module Size Used by Not tainted
appletalk 21508 1 (autoclean)
ipx 17316 1 (autoclean)
r128 74648 16
i810-tco 3088 0 (unused)
uhci 24560 0 (unused)
usbcore 58144 1 [uhci]
i810_audio 21160 2
ac97_codec 9512 0 [i810_audio]
soundcore 3332 2 [i810_audio]
pcmcia_core 38112 0
ide-scsi 8048 0
3c59x 26736 1

as well here is my /proc/version

root@mikes1-3:~# cat /proc/version
Linux version 2.4.20 (root@midas) (gcc version 3.2.2) #2 Mon Mar 17 22:02:15 PST 2003


hope that you can use this info to solve your issue I have not used redhat since 5.2 so I am not sure how they have butchered the modules and kernel.

I have a similair problem with this.
I have a Intel MB w/ built in sound support and using RH 9 on it.
The problem is that when one program uses the sound card (say xmms or xine) no other applications can use it. I get a '/dev/dsp device or resource busy' error.

Is it so that linux dosn't support sound from more than one application or what ? I suppose there's a problem with my dirvers.

I'm using the i810_audio module.

i810_audio 27624 1 (autoclean)
ac97_codec 14600 0 (autoclean) [i810_audio]
soundcore 6404 2 (autoclean) [i810_audio]

Does anyone know what I can do to make it work with more than one application ? Sure, I got a spare soundcard I could use... if there's no way to make this work.

Yes Linux can let more than one application use a sound device at once. For example I am currently listening to some oggs, getting sound notifications of incomming ICQ messages (with kopete), and getting system alarms as well. It sounds to me like your aRts is broken, OR you have your apps such as xine ans xmms to access the card directly by calling the /dev/dsp . Check your configs.

Yes, they are calling /dev/dsp I think. What should I do to prevent that ?

In XMMS I can configure the output plugin (OSS Driver 1.2.7) with:
Audi Device: Default (marked) or Use alternate device (/dev/dsp)

Btw, I can only use ONE sound application at the time.
Ex, If XMMS is running gaim can't access the soundcard.
If xine is using it gaim can't use it. etc...
You get the point ?

Yeah I know what you mean.

In xine go into the configuration and on the gui tab change the configuration experience level to Advanced. Then appy the changes and go to the audio tab. I have the audio driver to use set to auto but you can force it to aRts. I would force it to aRts because that would let you test to see if aRts is working at all. I think that when you change it to Rts that you wont get any sound from xine. What version of KDE are you running? you may have to recompile the aRts module.

Lemmie know how the test went.

Mike

I'm using Gnome, but I have aRts avalible in xmms

Well aRts is a part of KDE. Try using KDE (just as a test). I am never one to tell someone how to use their own computer (that is the beauty of Linux you can do whatever you want), but I would sugget that you try KDE, I find it much better then Gnome. You have it installed on your system I am sure. It really shouldn't make a difference but aRts is part of the KDE stream not Gnome's. I am not sure how Gnome interacts with hardware devices.