On-board sound (and soundcard)

I know there have been alot of sound questions on this board, and I have waded through most of them. I also read the sound-howto all to no avail. Setting up most other things have been fairly easy (except IP-MASQ which was a pain in the ass, but I eventually got it working). Now I'm on to sound.....

I have a PCI sound card (ALS4000) on computer0. I downloaded the alsa files and got my modules and whatnot out of it. I always hear of mixers and whatnot but that confuses me. How do I screw with the mixer levels?

Computer1 has on-board sound . How do I find out what to use for it? I don't know what kind of MB it is either (it came with some crappy gateway PC many moons ago).

(back to computer0)
When I try to cat somefile.wav >/dev/dsp or /dev/audio it says something like unknown device..... what could be the deal? I'm pretty sure I should play with the mixers first though because when I cat somefile.wav >snd-card0 (the alias I used) it dosen't complain (but nothing happens).

Thanks in advance for the help

onboard sound and old is probably a good thing as that means it was A) probably bug-tweaked and worked out a while ago, and B) common enough for the driver to get hacked out.

lspci should tell you the info on the card (if it isn't realllllly old and ISA), if it is, plug the mobo info into google and try to find the manual, really its a pain, but that's the best way I've found for ancient gear.

If you compiled alsa for the machine and not as a pre-install, you're going to have to modprobe the driver for your card from the alsa pile. That will (eventually) open /dev/dsp and or /dev/audio. What card is it offhand? does any of the alsa mods appear in "lsmod"?

Cheers,

Finegan

the modules for my card (on computer0) load fine. I use the snd-card-als4000 module and it loads it's friends.

thanks for the lspci tip - i didn't expect it would show on-board stuff.

Can somebody explain the deal with the mixers to me? I read that they're muted by default.....how do I unmute them?

thanks.

Kde has "kmix" that you can use to up the volume, it's under Multimedia in the K menu. One other thing to look for is the permissions for /dev/dsp#, /dev/audio# and /dev/sequencer#.