Toshiba Satellite M70 Laptop + Slackware 12.2 No Sound
 

Hello, I just installed Slackware 12.2 and I've got almost everything working except for the sound. I ran alsaconf and it seems to detect my soundcard (atiixp IXP SB400 AC97' Audio) but then the sound still won't work after I'm done getting it all set up. When I run alsamixer no volume controls come up either.

I'm a pretty big newb but I've been trying to read up as much as possible and get everything running as I like it but I can't seem to find an answer regarding this particular problem.

Any help is greatly appreciated. Thanks a ton!

exad.

In the end, the problem was that my webcam was interfering! hehe. I unplugged the webcam and rebooted. Then ran alsaconfig and alsamixer again and everything worked perfectly! Sorry for the false alarm!

Tomorrow I'll try to get the webcam working ^_^

Thanks!

I bet you are suffering from "Sound Card Roulette". If you have multiple sound devices in your computer, the first one detected gets assigned to be the default ALSA sound device.

If the first detected sound device happens to be a webcam's microphone, well, obviously it won't work right as the default ALSA sound card. Plus, if you try to bring up alsamixer, you won't see the mixer you expect (if you are lucky enough to see anything at all).

I ran into the same problem today with a USB piano keyboard getting detected before my sound card and becoming the default ALSA audio device. A workaround is to boot Linux before you plug in things like a webcam or a midi music device.

There are some other solutions out there having to do with modprobe and udev, but candidly I don't understand those approaches well enough to evaluate them.