Now the sound in this comp is working perfectly. The last thing I did to get it to work was to run alsaconf. Funny, but nowhere in the documentation does it mention that. Scruff mentioned it in passing in an email.
So, for those of you who browse this thread and have an Asus A7V8X-X motherboard, with onboard sound provided by a VIA VT8235 chipset, here's what you need to do, and have ->
On this box I am running Slackware 9.1 with kernel 2.4.23 installed. This will work just fine on kernel 2.4.22, the default with the Slackware 9.1 bare.i installation, also.
First, enable sound when you configure your kernel as a module, and select no for every chipset, so that you don't have anything except the soundcore.o module, like this ->
Code:
# Sound
#
CONFIG_SOUND=m
# CONFIG_SOUND_ALI5455 is not set
# CONFIG_SOUND_BT878 is not set
# CONFIG_SOUND_CMPCI is not set
# CONFIG_SOUND_EMU10K1 is not set
# CONFIG_SOUND_FUSION is not set
# CONFIG_SOUND_CS4281 is not set
# CONFIG_SOUND_ES1370 is not set
# CONFIG_SOUND_ES1371 is not set
# CONFIG_SOUND_ESSSOLO1 is not set
# CONFIG_SOUND_MAESTRO is not set
# CONFIG_SOUND_MAESTRO3 is not set
# CONFIG_SOUND_FORTE is not set
# CONFIG_SOUND_ICH is not set
# CONFIG_SOUND_RME96XX is not set
# CONFIG_SOUND_SONICVIBES is not set
# CONFIG_SOUND_TRIDENT is not set
# CONFIG_SOUND_MSNDCLAS is not set
# CONFIG_SOUND_MSNDPIN is not set
# CONFIG_SOUND_VIA82CXXX is not set
# CONFIG_SOUND_OSS is not set
# CONFIG_SOUND_AD1980 is not set
# CONFIG_SOUND_WM97XX is not set
#
Next, remove the existing ALSA packages from your system. Find them by entering ->
Code:
anna@peter:~$ ls -l /var/log/packages/alsa*
and then remove them by entering, as root ->
Code:
root@peter:/home/anna# removepkg alsa-driver-0.9.6-i486-3
root@peter:/home/anna# removepkg alsa-lib-0.9.6-i486-1
root@peter:/home/anna# removepkg alsa-oss-0.9.6-i486-1
root@peter:/home/anna# removepkg alsa-utils-0.9.6-i486-1
NB: It may not be necessary to remove these packages, but since I am installing a different version, and this was a suggestion that was posted in a thread where someone got their sound working, I did it.
Next, check to be sure you've removed those packages by doing ->
Code:
anna@peter:~$ ls -l /var/log/packages/alsa*
/usr/bin/ls: /var/log/packages/alsa*: No such file or directory
If there is anything left, get rid of it.
Then, go to
ALSA and download the first three files ->
Code:
alsa-driver-1.0.0rc2.tar.bz2
alsa-lib-1.0.0rc2.tar.bz2
alsa-utils-1.0.0rc2.tar.bz2
Next, go to the page for this sound card
VIA VT8235 and simply follow the instructions. The only difference is that to unzip and install the tarballs in one step, rather than the 2 steps in the instructions, you can use the command tar -xvjf and it's quicker. NB: So that I don't make a mistake, I keep this page open and cut and paste the instructions right into my console.
After you've done that part, the last instruction on the ALSA site you should have done is to insert these new modules into your kernel by doing modprobe snd-via82xx;modprobe snd-pcm-oss;modprobe snd-mixer-oss;modprobe snd-seq-oss
Now, since you're still logged in as root, type exit and then as a normal user run alsamixer and unmute every channel, turning up the sound to desired levels.
Now su to root again, and run alsaconf and just enter at the highlighted options until it's finished. Then run alsactl store to save the settings and have them load if you ever have to reboot your shiny new Linux system. Now, to finish this exercise, enter Ctl + Alt + Backspace to leave the X server, then enter startx as a normal user, and when KDE starts you should hear some funky, annoying drums and such. Well, it won't be annoying since you're hearing sound for the first time
And, you should be done! That worked for me, and I've now got sound working properly.
