My sound card is a Creative Soundblaster Audigy. Whenever sounds like MP3s play on Mandrake 9.2, the sound is noticeably duller than normal.

So I've tried downloading the latest ALSA drivers, version 0.9.3, and installing them, but after I followed the instructions and rebooted, a message popped up saying something like "Sound device could not be found, continuing with null output." I haven't had much success with previous ALSA installation attempts on Mandrake 9.1 and SuSE 8.2 either.

The nVidia drivers installation sticky in this Newbie forum is very helpful indeed. It'd be very nice if someone could likewise post an ALSA driver installation guide.

the document to install the alsa driver (working great here with an audigy2, ac3 passthru and all) for your soundcard is at:

http://alsa-project.org/alsa-doc/doc...module=emu10k1

That is, if you have a regular Audigy, if not then:

http://alsa-project.org/alsa-doc/doc...module=emu10k1

The only tricky part is the setting up of modules.conf, you will need something like:

# ALSA portion
alias char-major-116 snd
alias snd-card-0 snd-emu10k1
# module options should go here

# OSS/Free portion
alias char-major-14 soundcore
alias sound-slot-0 snd-card-0

# card #1
alias sound-service-0-0 snd-mixer-oss
alias sound-service-0-1 snd-seq-oss
alias sound-service-0-3 snd-pcm-oss
alias sound-service-0-8 snd-seq-oss
alias sound-service-0-12 snd-pcm-oss

Then, after that, remove any sound modules for that card you may have loaded and run the driver init script:

/etc/init.d/alsasound start

...should load the driver ok.

feel free to stop by #creative on irc.freenode.net for further help.

0.9.3? 0.9.8 is the current stable version.

Thanks for the link, Stunned. I'll read it and try to get things working. Yes, ABZ, I'm sorry, I meant 0.9.8.

I'm unclear about what "CVS" is. It says that if I'm using CVS I have to type ./cvscompile or make build instead of ./configure but I don't know if I have it or not. Also, what is DEVFS???

Please tell me if the mentioned method will work well for my sound card, and any special steps I might have to take. This is the info of my sound card, given by Mandrake Control Center.


Vendor: ‎Creative Labs

Alternative drivers: ‎snd-emu10k1

Bus: ‎PCI

Bus identification: ‎1102:4:1102:53

Location on the bus: ‎0:8:0

Description: ‎EMU10K2 Audigy Audio Processor

Module: ‎audigy

Media class: ‎MULTIMEDIA_AUDIO

CVS is code that can be checked out (downloaded) that is usually very unstable (or can be) and is the developer's version of whatever it may be. In general, you can avoid using CVS unless there is some feature in the CVS code of your package that is not in the regular version or you want to check it out for testing purposes or help develop.

So stick with 0.9.8 for now and ignore the cvscompile stuff

Thanks, Stunned. I stuck with ./configure

I didn't know how to "remove any sound modules for that card I may have loaded" though

In that ALSA Quick Install guide, where it says


Now insert the modules into the kernel.

modprobe snd-emu10k1;modprobe snd-pcm-oss;modprobe snd-mixer-oss;modprobe snd-seq-oss



I do as it says, and it returns


/lib/modules/2.4.22-10mdk/kernel/sound/acore/snd.o: unresolved symbol snd_verbose_printk
modprobe: insmod /lib/modules/2.4.22-10mdk/kernel/sound/acore/snd.o failed
modprobe: insmod snd-emu10k1 failed


and


/lib/modules/2.4.22-10mdk/kernel/sound/acore/snd.o: unresolved symbol snd_verbose_printk
modprobe: insmod /lib/modules/2.4.22-10mdk/kernel/sound/acore/snd.o failed
modprobe: insmod snd-pcm-oss failed


and likewise for snd-mixer-oss and snd-seq-oss.



PLEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEAAAASE help me out with this as it is driving me nuts!! I followed the instructions in that Quick Install guide, but none my modprobes seem to work

is your kernel version that you are running the same as your kernel-source?

check with:

'uname -a' to see what kernel you are running

then cd to /usr/src

and make sure /usr/src/linux or /usr/src/linux-2.4 is pointing to the kernel source that would be the same as your running kernel.

if not you can:

ln -sf /usr/src/your_running_kernel_source /usr/src/linux

then do a 'make clean' in the alsa directories and try again.

also make sure you have and updated kernel-headers installed, it won't be the same version as your kernel but just make sure you have the most recent.

also make sure the gcc you are using is the same that was used to compile the kernel, though i don't think that is your problem.

Have you got the kernel-source installed that matches your running kernel?

I am running kernel version 2.4.18-3. Do I have the proper source code?I do have the same kernel version source code installed in the directory /usr/src/linux-2.4.18-3 and there is a symbolic link named linux-2.4 pointing to it.

If you don't have it installed, try commanding

urpmi kernel-source

# What compiler version do I have installed
gcc -v
gcc --version

# What is the running kernel and compiler installed
cat /proc/version

Thanks all of you for your helpful tips.Sadly I haven't had progress. My source, headers, and gcc are all fine and I'm thinking about doing make clean in all ALSA directories and then going over the whole process again.

There is one curious thing though. In the Quick Install guide at
http://alsa-project.org/alsa-doc/doc...module=emu10k1
it tells the user to make a directory /usr/src/alsa and copy the ALSA source code into it. I'm not sure if this is really necessary, and I didn't do this anyway because I couldn't find the ALSA source code.

Is this step really necessary? If so, where can the ALSA source be found? I've downloaded the ALSA drivers, libs, and utils tarballs.

I still haven't got sound coming out of my Sound Blaster Audigy yet. Sound did come out before I attempted to install latest ALSA drivers, but it was dull. And a couple of weeks ago, I thought installing nVidia drivers was hard enough! (Now I've got em.)

Sorry to bug you all with my incompetency.

But I've gone through the whole process again. unzipping and ./configure;make;make install-ing of all ALSA packages - alsa-drivers, alsa-lib, alsa-utils - appears to go fine. It's only when I do


modprobe snd-emu10k1;
modprobe snd-pcm-oss;
modprobe snd-mixer-oss;
modprobe snd-seq-oss


that insmod snd-xxx failed appears for each command. I've checked out my source, headers, and gcc version just like Stunned and Fancypiper suggested. What could I possibly be doing wrong?

It isn't here?

What are the errors when modprobe? What is the distro?

ah, sorry, i scrolled up and saw it was mandrake.

it is possible doens't mandrake ship with alsa? i.e.:

rpm -qa|grep -i alsa

you may want to try and rpm -e --nodeps those packages before installing alsa from source.

it's possible the mdk alsa modules are somewhere non-standard in /lib/modules/kernel_version

hth.