I'm afraid I don't know much about h/w and I'm not sure how to proceed at the moment... My Linux system is running Fedora 12, and it has been working fine since I bought it several months ago. But when it got rebooted the other day after a kernel upgrade, the sound system appears to have disappeared. I can play movies but there is no audio channel, and games have no sound.

Checked in /dev and things like sndstat, pcmixer, audio don't exist.

I don't know what sound card was originally installed or if the sound is built into my motherboard - I can probably find out if necessary but I have not yet taken the machine apart to look.

Question - is there any easy way to probe the system and figure out what hardware is installed? Can I reload the sound drivers? Not sure what the correct procedure is in the current situation... Any pointers would be helpful.

I used yum to update the system - there have been a couple of kernel upgrades over the past week or so.

Thanks,

nbc

Is alsa installed ?

have a look in /proc/asound
There should be a file called cards which shows your hardware.

Also see if you can get pulseaudio going ...


http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=225660

There is an applet for Pulse Audio called device chooser which makes things easier too.
yum install alsa-plugins-pulseaudio