Hello,

until recently I had been using a Mandrake 9.1 Linux distro with partial updates installed and decided to switch to 9.2. I've done this by removing (using urpmi.removemedia) the 9.1 CD urpmi sources and added the 9.2 CDs instead, then did an urpmi --auto-select (I found this easier than booting the first CD and having to wait for some time in which my computer would be unusable). After this I've experienced serious sound problems - the bell sound when reaching the beggining of the line in a konsole window would sound distorted, often if I play something in XMMS the sound would become distorted (could be because of keyboard / mouse activity, but I think it also happens when I'm away from the computer). Also, sometimes when playing music in xmms playback stops when a certain tune in the playlist is over. The soundcard is working perfectly under Windows XP.

I have a Gigabyte 7VA motherboard with a Realtek ALC650 onboard sound chip. I don't know why, but until now this chip has worked very well with the VIA_82xx driver (are the two chips related / similar?) until now. I've tried booting with the old 9.1 kernel (the new one was the latest update available, 2.4.22-26mdk) to no avail. I've written down the mixer settings from my workplace (where I have Mandrake 9.1) and tried to apply something similar at home, again no success. At work channels like "Line In", "CD", "Mic" are unmuted and the volume is above 0, and I don't have problems with sound. At home the only unmuted channels are Master, PCM and VIA DXS. Strangely enough, when booting with a 2.4.22-26mdk kernel I get 4 VIA DXS channels. I've tried playing around with them (as advised in the Linux Audio Quality HOWTO on the Linux Audio Users Guide site), but still the noise doesn't go away.

Any ideas on how to make this problem go away? I've tried looking in the sound initialization scripts, I've deleted /etc/.aumixrc and also /etc/asound.state, and the only thing I've achieved is the suspicion that it's not configuration-related. I've also used the /etc/asound.state from work with no success. Btw, my asound.state file had two devices mentioned there (the first section would begin with "state.card0", the second with "state.8235") - could this be a hint for what's wrong?

Any help on this would be greatly appreciated.