No sound in Mandriva 2006

Originally Posted by tednewell CURIOUS -- I had the same problem as J CHANCE. Is a fix in on this yet or still no sounds out there? Totally frustrating.

tednewell : I solved the problem the sure fire quick and dirty way. Well quicker then waiting out here on someone probably doing what I did or researching it. After checking modprobe.conf and noticing that nothing was written to it by sndconfig which it claimed it did and with alsaconf just farting out trying to detect and not writing I reinstalled 2005. Alsaconf brought my sb awe64 right up so I then checked modprobe.conf and voila there was an entry for the card. I copied modprobe.conf to a floppy and reinstalled 2006. After the install I opened the modprobe.conf from 2005 copied the alsaconf configuration for my sb awe64 to the modprobe.conf for 2006, rebooted, and BAM sound.

Here is my alsaconf from 2005:

# --- BEGIN: Generated by ALSACONF, do not edit. ---
# --- ALSACONF verion 1.0.8 ---
options snd device_mode=0666
alias sound-slot-0 snd-sbawe
# --- END: Generated by ALSACONF, do not edit. ---

alias snd-0 snd-sbaweblacklist audio

Hope this helps

I am interested to know that sound worked on Suse10. That's my next move.

Hi there, yes I have fully working sound in SuSE 10.0.

I just used the default installation (but choosing my own packages) and all behaved itself as it should.

I have no idea why it didn't work in Mandriva 2006, when all was fine in 2005. In each case it was a basic default install.

All the suggestions I found were tried but with no success. I have all the same hardware and have changed nothing but the distro.

It transpired that SuSE 10 was only feigning cooperation. The burst of sound was temporary, I got one encore and that was that. And there are other problems.

Meantime, I ran on Mandriva 2006 the installer to which the motherboard manufacturer pointed me and, after an early show of no promise, sound is working on Mandriva 2006. So, I've broken off with SuSE and, hopefully, Mandriva and I can make a go of it this time.

Between you and me, though, I'm casting longing eyes at Debian Etch.

Well, I'm glad you have your sound at last in Mandriva 2006!

I have no idea why sometimes these distros work flawlessly and other times they don't, particularly when no change is made to one's hardware.

The main thing is to keep plugging away until we find one to suit us.

I have a friend with a SuSE 10.0 installation that won't play a DVD even with the appropriate codec packages installed. He has tried everything and is so frustrated he is going to Fedora Core 5.
And then I have two other friends whose FC5 installations have been so apallingly problematic that one changed to SuSE10 and it was worse! He is going back to his original FC4 which worked perfectly.

Good luck with all you do (I like the Debian based distros I have tried in the past, Mepis in particular, but have been told that Debian itself is hard to install) who knows, as my mum used to say "Just suck it and see!"

I'm trying to become a Linux fan, I really am, but I still can't get the damn stuff to work. Tried SUse 10, spotty sound and display issues. Trying a new install of Mandriva on a freshly formatted PC. No sound. Very discouraging. Any news on this front yet?

If your sound is not working, the Mandriva installer and control centre say to run sndconfig and alsaconf. Those are command lines you run as root. You probably already know this but, in case not, open a console/terminal, type in su (= super user/root) and enter. You then need to enter the root password.

alsaconf is best, if it works. If not and if sndconfig tells you the soundcard is not supported, you have to find a driver. If your soundcard is "on board", I'd suggest you do what I did and email the motherboard manufacturer (after searching its website which may just have the information). The other tack is to find out what chipset/soundcard you have and look on the alsa website. Then, the ultimate deterrent, a web search.

The older your hardware, the better your chances of getting a Linux driver. My hardware was brand new at installation time and the soundcard was "on board" (the worst combination, I gather) but the motherboard manufacturer was able to point me to an alsa-based driver.

If your sound is not working, the Mandriva installer and control centre say to run sndconfig and alsaconf. Those are command lines you run as root. You probably already know this but, in case not, open a console/terminal, type in su (= super user/root) and enter. You then need to enter the root password.

Thanks, I appreciate all the input, including the stuff I "probably already"(should)"know". Never enough repitition for a beginner.

I've played with the dang thing off and on since your answer, I've re-installed Mandriva, done everything but the ball peen hammer trick.

sndconfig and alsaconf do not exist, will not install, and basically are thumbing their noses at me.

The box is an old IBM pc, pentium III I believe. It has a sound card built into the mother board I've disabled in the bios, and a PCI card I installed and that is recognized and I have no problem finding drivers for. It just doesn't make any sound.

Frustrating.

Alan

I'll tag this on here in case anyone searching has same problem as I. Was playing around with mplayer and suddenly had no sound. Rebooted system, no sound - only a louder his when I turned the system's volume up higher, and no hiss when I had it set to mute.
Saw one of the posts here (thanks dolphans1) and turned up PCM in the mixer and boom! Sound is back!
Never manually changed it though, so I don't know how the problem started...but that I'll worry about most only if it happens again.

Originally Posted by Todd873 I'll tag this on here in case anyone searching has same problem as I. Was playing around with mplayer and suddenly had no sound. Rebooted system, no sound - only a louder his when I turned the system's volume up higher, and no hiss when I had it set to mute. Saw one of the posts here (thanks dolphans1) and turned up PCM in the mixer and boom! Sound is back! Never manually changed it though, so I don't know how the problem started...but that I'll worry about most only if it happens again.

I should have thought of that with my problem also. Windows even has an issue when you use certain players and turn down the volume to 0, for instance I have a TV tuner capture card that I use and often turn down the volume to 0 in that application and record the video then forget to turn it back up and when I try to listen to any .wav file from that point on I get no sound. It seems in Madriva there is a similar problem with just turning those volume controls back up.

This is an old thread now but I glad to see it is still helping those new to this OS. I'm getting better now with Linux (a year later, lol) but I still have a long way to go.

I am having serious problems with it running on my new x64 pentium 4 dual core though, but that's a whole new thread...