I have finally got Mandrake on my old PII system. And now I can not use my sound card. It worked just fine when I ran windows. What happened. Mandrake recognizes the hardware it will just not play any music. It is not the volume or the connections because I have tried them all. If anyone can help it will much appreciated.

Thanx,
Twiggz

i have pretty much the same problem (depends on what soud card you're using) and i'm trying to get it working...try this thread:
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/history/71849

i tried to install alsa driver, but it tells me it cannot find a certain kernel file...i'm suspecting a kernel...

Read through the thread I started entitled "SB Live and Red Linux 9"

You might benefit from some of the suggestions in my thread, and also the final reply that I just added.

I screwed around with it and I have no idea what I did but I got it to work finnaly thanx guys.

what did you do? i haven't resolved the problem...
probably it's not the same thing (dependes on mbo, sound card, disto...), but if you could write down what you did, it might be helpful

I have a Sound Blaster Live running on Mandrake 9.1. Mandrake doesn't recognize that I have a soundcard, even though it will play music cds. The problem is that mp3's and movies play but there is no sound for them. What can I do?

everyone has the same problem, and no-one has resolved it so far...maybe for sb live there are, check the other sound blaster live threasd(there are at least 3) you might find solution...

Well, I finally gave up and threw my Red Hat Linux in the trash, because there just wasn't a way to get it to work with my SB Live card and my digital speakers.

After considerable research, trying to decide on which distro to try next,... I spent the "roughly" 4 hours and downloaded the Mandrake ISOs. Loaded them in yesterday. The install seemed to go pretty good.

And would you believe it.... I could HEAR!!! all the system sounds (through my digital speakers), but playing a CD didn't work. I thought I was making great strides, and might be able to get the CD sound working today.

Fired up Mandrake Linux 9.1 this morning... and guess what???? No System Sounds, Nada, Nothing from the speakers.

I've checked the configurations, volumes and what have you until I'm blue in the face.... nothing works.... to bring my system sounds back.

So, now I'm right back to where I was with RH Linux, only now I have Mandrake 9.1 Linux ==== WITHOUT ANY SOUND OF ANY KIND!

I'm usually not one to give up on something without going to a lot of trouble to get it resolved. But this is less than funny.

I guess if I were the only one having sound problems, I would keep working on it, but based on all the other people (mostly newbies) who are complaining about the same (or similar) sound problems --I got to believe it is a really bad shortcoming of all Linux distros, with NO! REAL solution.

Well... it's back to Windows for me.... but I'll keep checking Linux, and maybe in a few years it will be ready for prime time. Certainly, it is not ready right now. I think it has great potential, just no where near ready to compete with Windows OS right now.

Oh yes.... did I mention that I have a brand new set of 6 CD coasters. Guess it wasn't a total loss.

you have decieded to crawl back to M$ 'cause of sound problem?!? i have it, and i+m not giving up till i get it right - the last solution is getting a new sound card (i have onboard crap)
i have more problems using ms(like having to restart windows 3-4 time every day - no kidding!) and i have 98se wich is "the best of the worst"
anyway, have you tried alsamixer command? you should unmute surround (wich is by default mute after every reboot). my problem is i can't run it - it says some app can't get it run - it's probably 'cause of the old alsa drivers previously installed...

Yup.... I'm headed back to the Gates Folly. At least I'm not spending every waking minute of all my free time --trying to get the sound to work.

I'm running Win XP Pro, and I don't have any problems with crashes or sound or anything. I just use it for the things I wanted a PC to do.

I wanted to look at Linux because as a retired programmer... I thought I should at least look at it..... based on some of the recent hoopla.

Well....... I looked at it... and the level of frustration getting simple little things to work that I've been used to working already, reminded me of the days when I was messing around with the printer interface for a Commodore C-64. (Probably before you were born .

I don't need another hobby, of debugging an OS just for the heck of it.... got plenty of other things to occupy my time.

Have fun......

" (Probably before you were born "
well, i wouldn't say that, since i used to make some simple games for c-64 (yes, i used it only for playing and creating games, but...)
what's wrong with dual boot?

Well... at my age, I just figure most of those I'm talking to, and meeting on forums are younger than me. Good for you.... then you have been around for probably as long as I have. My next computer from the C-64 was the original TANK. A Kaypro. Remember those babies. I think the case was built out of 11 gauge steel. Oh well.... those are days gone by................

What's wrong with a dual boot? Nothing. While trying my Linux distros I had them all on a dual boot. It's just that if I'm going to have a dual boot to a couple of different OS's.... I'd like to think they would both be usable. I don't consider my present Linux OS to be usable, ---probably No Sound is just the tip of a very big iceberg.

I'll keep "reading the mail", and maybe try it again at a later time.

I was just browsing through the messages today and read the sound issues everyone was posting. I have been running a Soundblaster XGamer 5.1 (SB Live!) (emu10k chipset) on Mandrake, Redhat and now for the past year or so Slackware 9.0. It works great. It has always worked on Slack, but on RH I had to disable the "Plug and Play OS" setting in my BIOS before RH would recognize the sound card. Once it did, no probs. Can't remember what I needed to do in Mandrake, but as I remember, I had no problems. This is an extremely popular sound chipset and according to RH, the Live! card is compatible with RH 8.0. Can't speak for 9.0. As for Mandrake, they report basically the same thing: the card is "compatible."

Maybe there are other issues preventing operation? I'd be happy to try and help, or there are about a million posts on various boards describing this exact problem if you want to search yourself. hate to see you give up on Linux because of a minor problem...

Paul

it seems penguinshool and mossy have resolved da sound problem - you have to uninstall all sound drivers and reinstall new alsa drivers...i haven't tried it yet - i have to figure out how to uninstall it

btw - are you still programming? what do you do/use?
about the history - i was a kid when i was using c-64, but at that time my mother used the big one - perforated cards stuff...she's a real oldschool programmer...

Oh no... now you're really making me feel old.... 'cause I can remember using decks of punch cards too.... you submit them on the afternoon of one day, and then look at your error printout on the next day. Then fix the errors and submit the deck again for the next nites processing. We call that Batch Processing.... hee hee.... for you young sprouts.

I coded a lot of different languages.... mostly all for internal Engineering use. Wrote a lot in FORTRAN, some BASIC, some assembly, Pascal, and later in my career.... C and C++. Also did a lot of utilities in SAS and VAX DCL. The last few years before retirement I did a bunch of MS Access applications (Access Basic) and RDB work using SQL and some Oracle application work.

Now I just do some recreational programming... and usually do it in WinBatch. You'd be surprised what you can do with WinBatch today. BTW, I never had to learn COBAL or Ada.