I decided to investigate Slackware and I thought I was getting along quite well with Slackware64-Xfce until I realized I heard not a sound. Oops, not good. So I have been trying for several days to first diagnose and then repair my problem. No luck thus far. What I hve larned is that I do not understand how to configure ALSA in Slackware.

Various documents on the web suggest using the “ALSA configurator” (alsaconf) to configure ALSA. Apparently that set of tools no longer is packaged with ALSA?

Question: Is there some functional substitute?

If I select ALSA-mixer (alsamixer) it shows me 3 unmuted S/PDIF devices. These evidently relate to the circuits on my System76 laptop labeled as HDA Intel MID which shows priority 0 on the device list.

If I use F6 I can select HDA Intel PCH with priority 1. If I select this I see the ALSA mixer sliders I am accustomed to seeing. The master slider is muted by default. I have learned how to unmute it and save that configuration so that the ALSA mixer is not muted when it comes up. I still hear no sounds of any sort. So that alone does not solve my problem.

Question: Am I correct that I need to set HDA Intel PCH as priority 0 and HDA Intel MID as priority 1 in order to solve my problem? I have no idea how to do that. Can anyone direct me to a document that explains how to do it?

Is there some other way to solve this problem that I have missed?

Thank you for reading this post.

Yes there really is with a little more info.
lets start here http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...-a-4175497740/

here is another http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...ce-4175497387/

you will see aplay -l will give you the read out that will show you your default card down.
this is mine.
but for some reason Slackware liked to put my webcam first or my nvidia hdmi so to fix this problem I did this. I created a /etc/modprobe.d/sound.conf
looked like this.
then from http://docs.slackware.com/howtos:har..._snd-hda-intel
you will read how to load the proper module. If the kernel is having issues.

pat named it the /etc/modprobe.d/snd-hda-intel.conf

Just in case Drakeo's post isn't clear to you, you may find that the problem is a missing module that needs to be loaded with modprobe as root.

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IMHO the easiest solution is to tell which modules you don't want to have as your main sound card. This can also be seen as the reverse configuration of Drakeo.

Example for my setup:

This will prefer every other soundcard before using my TV card and my HDMI output. You will just have to replace those with your unwanted driver - as in Drakeo's description lsmod | grep ^snd_pcm should give you the relevant module names. If you want to use it as a reverse list then just don't forget the leading comma after the equals sign. That one line should be everything you need.

Thank you all! This is what I needed to get some traction on this problem. I will report back hoping we can mark this thread as "solved" when I do so.

We have a solution thanks to the several people who posted and the HowTos on SlackDocs. Let me report the next steps in my successful search for sound with Slackware64-14.1. Doing so might help someone else.

Drakeo was right. I had missed some relevant documents. Slackdocs/HowTo articles-Hardware contains "Audio and snd-hda-intel"and also "Sound Problems on Slackware." These two documents held the keys to this problem. So here is what I did.

Q. What does aplay -l show?

**** List of PLAYBACK Hardware Devices ****
card 0: MID [HDA Intel MID], device 3: HDMI 0 [HDMI 0]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 0: MID [HDA Intel MID], device 7: HDMI 1 [HDMI 1]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 0: MID [HDA Intel MID], device 8: HDMI 2 [HDMI 2]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 1: PCH [HDA Intel PCH], device 0: VT1802 Analog [VT1802 Analog]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 1: PCH [HDA Intel PCH], device 2: VT1802 Alt Analog [VT1802 Alt Analog]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0

What I noticed was that the HDMI devices were listed as card 0 while the VT1802 was listed as card 1.

Q. What does lsmod | grep snd show?

snd_hda_codec_via 19806 1
snd_hda_codec_hdmi 29622 1
snd_hda_intel 34861 4
snd_hda_codec 143196 3 snd_hda_codec_hdmi,snd_hda_codec_via,snd_hda_intel

snd_hwdep 6388 1 snd_hda_codec
snd_pcm 76009 3 snd_hda_codec_hdmi,snd_hda_codec,snd_hda_intel

snd_page_alloc 7098 2 snd_pcm,snd_hda_intel
snd_timer 18614 1 snd_pcm
snd 58630 15 snd_hwdep,snd_timer,snd_hda_codec_hdmi,snd_hda_codec_via,snd_pcm,snd_hda_codec,snd_hda_intel
soundcore 5354 1 snd

I understood that snd_hda_intel showed the proper module being loaded.

Q. What did alsamixer show?

It showed three S/PDIF devices as 0 HDA Intel MID. Using F6 I went to “1 HDA Intel PCH”. This showed the ALSA mixer controls I would expect to see. The Master was not muted.

Q. What was the solution path?

According to "Sound Problems on Slackware" I should be able to test this card by specifying the card to test as follows: "aplay -D plughw:1,0 test.wav" This returned "No such file or directory." So where was test.wav? This set off a rather long search.

In /usr/share/sounds/alsa/ I did not see test.wav but I did see Noise.wav, so I tried that. "aplay -D plughw:1,0 Noise.wav" returned the same “No such file ..." So I next tried this with the full path to Noise.wav doing "aplay -D plughw:1,0 /usr/share/sounds/alsa/Noise.wav"

This worked! OK, now I knew that the card at 1,0 could make noise. It looked to me that the remaining task was to make it the default card.

So I followed Drakeo and went back to the "Audio and snd-hda-intel" document I had missed initially. I then did

echo "options snd-hda-intel model=auto" > /etc/modprobe.d/snd-hda-intel.conf

A check of modprobe.d showed the file in place. I then rebooted the system.

No joy; alsamixer still reported the HDMI ports as Card 0 and the Intel PCH card as card 1. This was confirmed by aplay -l. If I did cat /etc/modprobe.d/snd-hda-intel.conf it read back “options snd-hda-intel model=auto” as I thought it would.

I then reviewed the several posts on this thread as well as the two HowTos in SlackDocs mentioned earlier. I elected to follow the suggestions in "Sound Problems on Slackware" to create /etc/asound.conf as shown in that document, since card 1, device 0 was also my working alsa card. This seemed to me the simplest approach. With that done I then rebooted hoping to see a change in the default order of preferred sound-cards.

Interesting: There was no apparent change in the order of the cards but asound.conf must route the sound to the proper card because my speakers now work just as they should!

There is one small thing I do not understand but doubtless more experienced Linux folks do. I can no longer start alsa mixer at the cli by simply typing “alsamixer”. Instead I must now specify the card, “alsamixer -c1” If I do that I can control alsamixer from the cli.

I started the Xfce desktop and clicked on the mixer app. Everything worked as it should.

So my problem is solved with my thanks to all who contributed. I learned a lot starting with the fact that the first place to look is SlackDocs!

You know I think Slackware is a keeper and that means I really ought to purchase something from the Slackware store.

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Alsa.conf is located here now...

/usr/share/alsa/alsa.conf

I have 2 sound cards and while I was able to set everything in Phonon, but flash streaming video had no sound.

I ran aplay -l and determined the card I wanted to be the default was #2. So in the above file I made this change...

From (a section a little ways down)

# defaults
#

# show all name hints also for definitions without hint {} section
defaults.namehint.showall off
# show just basic name hints
defaults.namehint.basic on
# show extended name hints
defaults.namehint.extended off
#
defaults.ctl.card 2 #Changed from card 0
defaults.pcm.card 2 #Changed from card 0

Restart alsa or reboot and that's it. More info at...

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php...d_Architecture

Now when you start alsamixer if in fact the default card has been properly set alsamixer will open it, not another card. The others will have to be opened via F6 key.