Sound Card on SUSE10 Major Problems
 

Pardon me but I am a newbie so here goes an attempt.

I just loaded SUSE10 as a dual boot on its own disk, kernel = 2.6.13-15-default

The "c-media electronics" audio controller listed below is a SIIG 7.1 Soundwave, and the "VIA technologies AC97 Audio Controller is on the MBO.

Apparently these two audio cards are not supported in Linux? When I installed Linux, the driver for the "c-media" card did not adjust the volume correctly. Volume output was about 25% of normal. The test sounds from YAST however played loud and normal. The only time I ever got full volume (say playing an mp3) was when during an mp3 playback, I opened up the configuration gui in YAST and started adjusting something. Could this have to do with being a super-user as this is occurring? FWIW I never got any sound from the on-board card and it was installed as the second controller (#1).

After trying everything I could try in KDE, I tried alsaconf according to a tip online. This process seemed to go well, It played the same test sound that the GUI YAST PCI Sound card Configuration screen did, but after that there is no sound at all. Furthermore, I could not access alsamixer gui through KDE. I went back to YAST and reloaded from the DVD all the alsa modules as it seemed like they had become corrupted or something. Now There is no sound whatsoever. I would appreciate any help. Thanks.

00:00.0 Host bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc.: Unknown device 0204
00:00.1 Host bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. K8M800 Host Bridge
00:00.2 Host bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. K8M800 Host Bridge
00:00.3 Host bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. K8M800 Host Bridge
00:00.4 Host bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. K8M800 Host Bridge
00:00.7 Host bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. K8M800 Host Bridge
00:01.0 PCI bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT8237 PCI bridge [K8T800/K8T890 South]
00:09.0 Multimedia audio controller: C-Media Electronics Inc CM8738 (rev 10)
00:0f.0 IDE interface: VIA Technologies, Inc. VIA VT6420 SATA RAID Controller (rev 80)
00:0f.1 IDE interface: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82C586A/B/VT82C686/A/B/VT823x/A/C PIPC Bus Master IDE (rev 06)
00:10.0 USB Controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82xxxxx UHCI USB 1.1 Controller (rev 81)
00:10.1 USB Controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82xxxxx UHCI USB 1.1 Controller (rev 81)
00:10.2 USB Controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82xxxxx UHCI USB 1.1 Controller (rev 81)
00:10.3 USB Controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82xxxxx UHCI USB 1.1 Controller (rev 81)
00:10.4 USB Controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. USB 2.0 (rev 86)
00:11.0 ISA bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT8237 ISA bridge [KT600/K8T800/K8T890 South]
00:11.5 Multimedia audio controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT8233/A/8235/8237 AC97 Audio Controller (rev 60)
00:12.0 Ethernet controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT6102 [Rhine-II] (rev 78)
00:18.0 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] HyperTransport Technology Configuration
00:18.1 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] Address Map
00:18.2 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] DRAM Controller
00:18.3 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] Miscellaneous Control
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation NV34 [GeForce FX 5200] (rev a1)

I've just gone through a couple of hours of trouble trying to get another sound card to work, without success. I'm no expert, obviously, but you might look at your KDE sound software selections. KDE uses the aRts API to connect to the ALSA sound system.

As far as accessing ALSAMIXER through KDE: I believe you need to use Konsole. Just open the terminal, become superuser and type "alsamixer".

Final thought, make sure all your speaker connections are located in the correct output jacks. Yeah, I know your not a idiot, but neither am I and it still happened.

bump
 

Still looking for some perls of wisdom if any are to be had. I have tried all the obvious stuff. Nowhere in the documentation for the SIIG Soundwave 7.1 sound card nor the AC97 MBO sound seems to indicate linux support. Open sound does not even list these devices. Its not a fancy sound card by any means.

Are there any 50-60 dollar sound cards that work with SUSE 10 right out of the box?

Thanks!

I feel your pain.

I just did the EXACT SAME THING. SUSE 10 dual boot on a second drive and C-Media AC97 on the motherboard and I don't get sound at all. The sound DID work for a few days then suddenly died when I tried to play an MP3.

Question, are you using KDE. If so have you checked to see if you have all the required KDE sound pluggins installed. Try opening YAST, software. In the search box type "sound." Make sure you have all the KDE multimedia addons.

Then go to your desktop menu and open Control Center -> Sound and Multimedia -> Sound system. You will have a window with two tabs. One is for General settings, the other is Hardware settings. Click on the Hardware Setting tab and in the first box you will see a drop down tab. Click on this and select Advance Linux Sound Architecture and click on the "apply" button.

KDE will then try to restart the sound driver. On my machine it works sometimes. If it fail to restart the driver you restart it yourself by going into your terminal and log on as a superuser, like so:

$su
enter passwd:

/etc/init.d/sound restart

Once the sound driver has been restarted open your media player of choice and give it a try. Oh! By the way, if you're using external speakers, you will need to open the sound mixer and activate 'pcm' output device. It is usually muted.

well....
 

when I go to YAST and go to the sound configuration screen, both sound cards (PCI and on-board) show up as "not configured". When I try to automatically configure, it merely says there is an error.

there is also no command named "sound" in the init.d directory

This is not completely relevant, but I still think it ought to be said here.

I just updated from SUSE 10.0 to the dev build of 10.1 and I've not been having the same kind of sound problems at all. MP3's refuse to play whatsoever and a 3k+ playlist (the whole library through the gnome native mp3 player as well as the KDE one and yet another one bundled in the distro). I don't know whether to blame something sound or to blame NTFS. All of the songs are far far away in the My Music directory of my XP install so...

I'm going to blame Microsoft because they're more fun to bash on.

I had the same problem when I cahnged sound cards - I found another post that suggested deleting /etc/module.d/sound and then re-run YAST. This worked fine and no problems with sound.

Cheers

Dave