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Hello. I'm just starting out on Mandrake 10.1 and I've run into a problem with my sound. Installed in my machine is a Soundblaster Live! 24-bit card. If I try to load music into Amarok, I get the message
Sound server informational message
Error while initializing sound driver:
device /dev/dsp can't be opened (no such file or directory)
The sound server will continue, using the null output device.
And sure enough, there is no directory /dev/dsp.
If I go to the "services" part of the Mandrakelinux Control Center. one of the services it offers to launch on boot is alsa, but next to the word alsa it says "stopped" and pressing start doesn't change that.
Go to www.alsa-project.org. Click on 'SoundCard' links, select your manufacturer (Creative), and then find your card. When you find your card, you'll see a link to details on how to set things up. The downloads are available at alsa-project's home page, and the alsa-users mailing list (accessible at the home page, too) is quite useful.
I hope this helps. It will certainly point you in the right direction. I have a SB Live 24-bit card built into my motherboard, and it took a while of tweeking to get it to work.
Steve
PS - forgot to mention - you'll definitely need to upgrade alsa (via the directions) to get this card to work; it's newer, and needs the new drivers that aren't shipped yet.
I have visited this page, but I get hung up on the step where I enter "chmod a+rw /dev/dsp /dev/mixer /dev/sequencer /dev/midi", which returns something similar to "chmod: cannot access `/dev/dsp': No such file or directory" for each directory. I feel like maybe at some point in this process something should be creating these directories, but they still don't exist. Thanks in advance for any further help.
I've run into that, too. In fact, the only time I got the sound card to work was after I upgraded to the latest kernel (2.6.11-1.27), and THEN went through those steps. But, I'm also running FC3, and I think there's a difference in how the device files are handled. Try the kernel upgrade, if you haven't already.
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