Sound card problems
 

Red Hat 9

I can play a CD, but there is no volume. When I try to adjust the volume, I get the following error:

Volume control is unable to run correctly.

Unable to open audio device '/dev/mixer'.
Please check that you have permissions to open '/dev/mixer'
and that you have sound support in your kernel.

Press Quit to exit Volume control

Any ideas? I believe I have the Sound Blaster Live sound card.

TIA, Jeff

can you get system sounds? what mixer are you using? (alsa, oss, etc...)

I don't hear a thing. When I run the audio config, it just says no sound card detected.

Guess I need a new sound card for Linux.....Any recommendations?

Hi there :) You don´t have to get a new card, soundblaster live works just fine in linux...

If your soundblaster live isn´t a dell card (their SB live uses a different chip - if not sure if there is support for it), then it´s module (driver) is emu10k1. If you are using alsa, try this in command line: modprobe emu10k1 (as root - this will load your soundcards module into the kernel)

Now try to set it up again - this time it should detect it. At least in debian you can just type alsaconf as root and select the card. After this you need to unmute your sound. You can use any mixer to do it, for example alsamixer in bash.

ps: You might want to switch distro, redhat 9 is no longer supported (in other words there are no more security updates for it from redhat). Thus it is not a secure distribution to run. If you still want to use redhat, check out fedora core 2, which was just released a while ago. (fedora is free)

Unfortunately it is a dell card.