Alsa problems, 2.6 kernel
 

Hi, I have seen alsa drive some people crazy, and now it is my turn...

Here is the situation. Installed Slackware 10.2 with 2.4 kernel. I then compiled and installed my custom 2.6.14 kernel, configuring yes to alsa support, and my soundcard. Also installed udev and hotplug before I rebooted. Making sure udev is executable. So, after reboot everything is fine, except that there is no sound.

I run alsaconf, and it seems to find my soundcard. It writes some lines to modprobe.conf. Then I run alsamixer to tune the settings, and get "function snd_ctl_open failed for default: No such file or directory". And when starting KDE I get the message "Error while initializing the sound driver: device /dev/dsp can't be opened (No such file or directory)".

My lsmod:

Module Size Used by
snd_pcm_oss 48320 0
snd_mixer_oss 17024 1 snd_pcm_oss
uhci_hcd 31184 0
i2c_i801 7660 0
ehci_hcd 29800 0
usbcore 110624 3 uhci_hcd,ehci_hcd
snd_intel8x0 30048 0
snd_ac97_codec 93596 1 snd_intel8x0
snd_ac97_bus 1760 1 snd_ac97_codec
snd_pcm 82440 3 snd_pcm_oss,snd_intel8x0,snd_ac97_codec
snd_timer 21412 1 snd_pcm
snd 46084 6 snd_pcm_oss,snd_mixer_oss,snd_intel8x0,snd_ac97_codec,snd_pcm,snd_timer
soundcore 7584 1 snd
snd_page_alloc 8456 2 snd_intel8x0,snd_pcm
yenta_socket 24492 1
rsrc_nonstatic 11776 1 yenta_socket
pcmcia_core 36368 2 yenta_socket,rsrc_nonstatic

As far as I can see, the 2.6 kernel autoloads the correct modules for my soundcard. The problem seems to be that there are no sound devices created by udev in the /dev directory. So I then tried to create these devices by hand with help of the snddevices script found in the alsa driver source. Then I got no errormessages anymore, but still, no sound could be heard. And after a reboot, the devices were no longer there, of course. Back to square one again.

I have read a bit about reinstalling alsa-drivers, utils, and libraries after a custom kernel compile. However, what exactly does the alsa-drivers package do? Are they not just the alsa kernel modules for all soundcards? Which I configured and compiled in the kernel already. Look at my lsmod, the modules are there and loaded.

What do I need to do? This really drives me crazy...

Thanks for any help provided!

add root and your users to the "audio" group.........

Thanks, but it did not change anything. I still get the mentioned error messages.

Re: Alsa problems, 2.6 kernel
 

You are right. You don't need the alsa-driver package if you've compiled your own kernel.

The other two - alsa-utils and alsa-libs should be installed already.

rkelsen, thanks for the clarification. Wish I knew why no sound devices are created in /dev.

Got the sound to work, suddenly. I manually executed "udevstart", and the neccessary sound devices got created. Sound worked perfectly in KDE after that. So I guess that for some reason, udev fails to recognize the alsa sound kernel modules at boot. Maybe because the autoloaded alsa modules are delayed in their initialization... and simply not finished by the time udev is executed?