rh8 and soundblaster, again
 

Hello,

I know this one has been beaten to death, but perhaps that means someone will have an easy time shedding light on my situation. I have a fairly fresh install of rh8.0 on a dell dimension 8250 with a Soundblaster Live! 5.1 on board, and I get no sound.
I installed and am using KDE 3.1, though I can't get sound in gnome either. The kernel is 2.4.18-14.

Here is what I have done so far:

- Installed emu10k1, alsa driver/lib/utils 0.9.0rc8 (I did this from source/non-rpm because I could not rebuild the driver src rpm from freshrpms for some reason).

- Run alsamixer to unmute the various channels

- Edited /etc/modules.conf, here are the edited portions:
# 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-emu10k1
# 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
post-install sound-slot-0 /bin/aumix-minimal -f /etc/.aumixrc -L >/dev/null 2>&1 || :
pre-remove sound-slot-0 /bin/aumix-minimal -f /etc/.aumixrc -S >/dev/null 2>&1 || :

- From the KDE control center, I've disabled the arts sound server.

- I've disabled redhat-config-soundcard so I don't accidentally mess with alsa

- Running '/etc/init.d/alsasound start' tells me that the alsa driver is indeed running.

- 'cat *somebigfile* > /dev/dsp' gives me nothing

- I've tested sound in my windows partition. It works great so it's not a hardware issue

Any help would be much appreciated.

Thanks

Actual error messages when trying to play a sound might help us out ?

about sound
 

Hi,
Friend.have you tried out the utility named "sndconfig".Try this utility.If ur problem does not solved then come back to me.I will give another best solution.

To trickykid,

No errors logged anywhere that I can find (syslog, dmesg), and none at the command line - I pipe some input to /dev/dsp, wait for time proportional to size of input, and control returns to shell. Do you know where the errors should be logged?


To raja,

I could be wrong, but I thought redhat-config-soundcard was supposed to be a direct upgrade to sndconfig (the former did not fix the prob). I will try sndconfig though (I know upgrades aren't always improvements across all situations).

sorry, sent prev mesg too early.

I won't have access to the machine until tomorrow - I'll report back about sndconfig then.

Thanks!

The report is in on sndconfig - I haven't gotten it to fix the problem. Part of the reason may be that I can't seem to fully undo the changes that I made while installing the alsa driver. Sndconfig finds emu10k1 which it does not support, rather than the Soundblaster/unknown device message that I used to get with redhat-config-soundcard (prior to alsa installation).

Sndconfig msg:
Model: Unknown vendor|Generic
snd-emu10k1 device
not currently supported

I have re-edited my modules.conf to take out all references to alsa-related modules and I have uninstalled the alsa driver/libs/utils.

Any further advice will be appreciated - either suggesting ways to get rid of the remaining alsa residue or the "plan B" that was previously mentioned.

Thanks

www.opensound.com should have the driver you need.

What if you don't want to pay? Why is setting up a Soundblaster Live! such a big deal???

pierogie - I'm having the same problem. Did you find an answer?

No answers, sorry. I didn't want to pay either (although the opensound demo did do the trick), and after investing a large portion of three workdays into this problem I decided to call it sunk cost. Now I just hook my headphones into an adjacent Mac. Fortunately, the only sound I need is streaming radio.