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I am most definitely a newbie to Linux. I have a RedHat 7.0 installation on an ASUS A7V266-E motherboard that uses the C-Media 8738 chipset. I have spent nearly a full work day trying to get my sound to work - with partial success. Having scanned every message and board I can find - but still no success, I have attempted to answer all the obvious questions below as part of my question...
My driver is cmpci, it loads correctly as far as I can tell, modprobe has no complaints. I have run sndconfig which seems to have also correctly identified the sound card and performed whatever magic it thought necessary. The sound bite at the end of sndconfig was terribly static filled, but I could make out a human voice saying something. As part of running sndconfig, I had to install awesfx, sox, and playmidi. I have verified that I can
play /usr/share/sounds/startup1.wav
and the sound is great (for cheap speakers). However, I have read that a quick and easy check is to
cat /usr/share/sounds/startup1.wav > /dev/audio
which does nothing but generate a staticy hissing squeal (just ask my co-workers). This happens whether I do it from a gnome terminal window, or when I am logged out of gnome and the window manager.
From the Gnome control panel for setting event sounds, when I attempt to play a sample sound - nothing comes out at all. My CPU monitor shows additional activity, and I even installed and ran eXtace (visual sound wave form display) and it shows "cool" patterns - but no sound. I Installed the aumix-X11 and pumped up the volume to the max on it and my speakers - no change. Without the play command, I would think my card was broken - but i can "play" any wav file any time with no problems.
Well after you "modprobe" your module, LSMOD (in lowercase) will display all modules loaded, you can use that to verify whether it did actually load. If so, follow that with a startx, and get into your favorite X. You needn't use aumix, as gmix will work just fine. Make sure all volumes are up, and microphone is muted. Start up xmms and try playing some files with it, usually this will at least point you to possible solutions if the sound is not set up correctly.
When you "cat" the file to the audio device, you may not have the correct permissions on the device, and that could be one of the problems. I am just guessing, but if the play command works, then you probably have got it up correctly.
lsmod confirms that cmpci is loaded. I checked the permissions on /dev/audio. They were crw------- so I chmod 666 to get crw-rw-rw-
but that made no difference.
Then I loaded xmms (with the required MikMod library). Attempting to play a .wav file showed a nice graphical display of the sound as it was being played - but nothing came out of the speakers - not even a squeak or a hiss.
So the problem sitll remains - I can "play" sounds using the "play" command, but nothing else generates anything good - not cat, not xmms.
Any other ideas anyone?
Last edited by Rodney Riggs; 08-26-2002 at 10:38 AM.
Very often the "dumb" things are the ones that get me., however not this time. I believe that I had already fiddled with the volume setting, but I did it again to be sure. With volumes cranked to the max on aumix and my external speaker - there is still no sound generated.
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