LinuxQuestions.org - Sound Card Issues

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Sound Card Issues

Hi, I've been running Slackware 10.1 for about two weeks (well haven't been using it every day, or very often at all in fact) and the main reason is because I can't seem to get sound to work. Before with the default 2.4.29 kernel I could install the drivers from realtek, but then when I rebooted I would have to reinstall them. Now I can't even install them, after compiling a 2.6.13 kernel. I still have the 2.4 of course, but I want to use the latest and greatest and 2.6 boots way faster. Here is the output of lspci:

Quote:

00:00.0 Host bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT8375 [KM266/KL266] Host Bridge
00:01.0 PCI bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT8633 [Apollo Pro266 AGP]
00:07.0 Communication controller: Lucent Microelectronics LT WinModem (rev 02)
00:10.0 USB Controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT6202 [USB 2.0 controller] (rev 80)
00:10.1 USB Controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT6202 [USB 2.0 controller] (rev 80)
00:10.2 USB Controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT6202 [USB 2.0 controller] (rev 80)
00:10.3 USB Controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. USB 2.0 (rev 82)
00:11.0 ISA bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT8235 ISA Bridge
00:11.1 IDE interface: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82C586A/B/VT82C686/A/B/VT823x/A/C/VT8235 PIPC Bus Master IDE (rev 06)
00:11.5 Multimedia audio controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT8233/A/8235/8237 AC97 Audio Controller (rev 50)
00:12.0 Ethernet controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT6102 [Rhine-II] (rev 74)
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc RV280 [Radeon 9200 SE] (rev 01)

Any other information needed? This is aggravating. I got the Radeon proprietary drivers to work but when I go to install these it says "No supported PnP or PCI card found." On the 2.4 kernel it didn't say that and loaded fine.

One last piece of information, when booting at the very end I get these messages:

FATAL: Module snd_pcm_oss not found
FATAL: Module snd_mixer_oss not found

This shouldn't matter though right, because I'm using ALSA and not OSS.

Here's a little checklist I ripped off from a thread here, and have used often since. See if it helps.

1. Check the card is recognised:
#lspci | grep Multimedia ... should list your PCI devices, and you should see a multimedia device there somewhere
eg. I get:
0000:00:05.0 Multimedia audio controller: C-Media Electronics Inc CM8738 (rev 10)
0000:00:0f.0 Multimedia video controller: Brooktree Corporation Bt878 Video Capture (rev 11)
0000:00:0f.1 Multimedia controller: Brooktree Corporation Bt878 Audio Capture (rev 11)
The sound card is the first entry

2. Check a kernel module is loading for that card
#lsmod | grep snd ... will list all the loaded modules that have anything to do with sound. One of them will be related to the sound card you are using
eg. mine is snd_cmipci

3. Add an audio group
#groupadd audio

4. Add your user to that group
#usermod -G audio username

5. Check / change devuice permissions:
#ls -l /dev/audio /dev/dsp /dev/mixer
#chown root:audio /dev/audio /dev/dsp /dev/mixer

Haven't tried it, but from my pspci output you can already see that it does indeed find my sound card as a multimedia device. I think it has something to do with the kernel, since it was my first time compiling a kernel it's likely I missed something. And as for the audio groups thing, isn't it likely that root will already have access to the sound device?