No sound card detected

pqueiro · 12-22-2004, 10:41 PM

I have installed Debian/Testing on my laptop and whenever I boot up KDE I get this message:

Code:

Sound server informational message:
Erro while initializing the sound driver:
device /dev/dsp can't be opened (No such device)
The sound server will continue, using the null output device

Needless to say, no sound. I've checked /dev and there is no such thing as a dsp file there. I've been snooping around and I've tried running alsaconf - which apparentely detected my sound hardware but it still won't work. I've checked /etc/modules.conf for sound-related modules and there are a whole bunch of them there, both oss and alsa related. Two of them caught my eye:

Code:

alias sound off
alias soundcard off

What do they mean?

Also, when I do lsmod |grep snd plenty of entries pop up:

Code:

snd_atiixp             19880  0
snd_ac97_codec         59268  1 snd_atiixp
snd_pcm_oss            48168  0
snd_mixer_oss          16640  1 snd_pcm_oss
snd_pcm                85384  2 snd_atiixp,snd_pcm_oss
snd_timer              23172  1 snd_pcm
snd                    50660  6 snd_atiixp,snd_ac97_codec,snd_pcm_oss,snd_mixer_oss,snd_pcm,snd_timer
soundcore               9824  1 snd
snd_page_alloc         11144  2 snd_atiixp,snd_pcm

As an extra detail, when I press the mute button on my laptop, I get a message saying that "kmix is apparentely not running".

At any rate, I know that I can have sound under Linux on my HP Pavilion zx5051 - earlier installations of Suse and Mandrake have had no problems with that. My biggest problem here is that I'm a bit of a newbie, so I'm somewhat lost

what can I do to solve this?

Thanks for any help you can give me

jmr71769 · 12-23-2004, 09:40 AM

Quote:

Needless to say, no sound. I've checked /dev and there is no such thing as a dsp file there.

stop right here. right off the bat, you have no /dev/dsp? let's create it! as root:

$ mknod /dev/dsp c 14 3

then:

$ adduser <yourusername> audio

*or*

$ chmod o=+rw /dev/dsp
$ chmod o=+rw /dev/mixer

then:

$ apt-get install aumix mp3blaster

log out as root, log out as user, log back in. don't start x yet (if possible).

99.99% of the things you can do with linux, can be done in console/cli. as regular user, run aumix and play with your mixer settings.

hopefully, you *have* a mixer now. as regular user:

$ mp3blaster http://64.236.34.67:80/stream/1018

hear anything yet?

hit 'q' to quit mp3blaster. run aumix again or run it in screen and play with your settings until you get the volume you like. your mp3player/streamer should come with it's own eq so play with that too of course.

i hope this works for you! otherwise, you may need to play with your modules/other settings.

good luck and don't give up! debian's good stuff.

SlackerLX · 12-23-2004, 09:46 AM

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