No Sound under Debian 3.1 r0a
 

Hello:

I have been struggling with two main issues under Debian 3.1 r0a (Sarge) on my box. I decided to divide them into two separte questions (even though the "second" one will be rather three questions in one).

Anyhow, first things first:

My System is an Older Dell Optiplex GX1p (P3 500 mhz, 447 MB RAM, 60 GB Hard Drive, Samsung DL DVD-RW, and the sound card is integrated Crystal Sem CS4236)

I am getting no sound right now and running kernel 2.6.8-2-386

Not sure what i need to fix to get it to work.

Help is appreciated :-)

Try running (as root): dpkg-reconfigure linux-sound-base, and selecting alsa. This should blacklist OSS modules which sometimes cause problems

No go
 

Hello and thanks for your response.


I tried the dpkg-reconfigure linux-sound-base and got

Package `linux-sound-base' is not installed and no info is available.
Use dpkg --info (= dpkg-deb --info) to examine archive files,
and dpkg --contents (= dpkg-deb --contents) to list their contents.
/usr/sbin/dpkg-reconfigure: linux-sound-base is not installed

mmm let's see... Just apt-get install it.. it is only 124 bytes. Also install alsa-utils, if you haven't yet. After that run the following, as root:
Follow the instructions, and let us know the results.

Still not working
 

I tried to apt-get install it, and maybe I am missing something, but the package is definitely not called linux-sound-base apparently, here is what I got when I tried apt-get install...


teobbs2:/home/jmneedham# apt-get install linux-sound-base
Reading Package Lists... Done
Building Dependency Tree... Done
E: Couldn't find package linux-sound-base
teobbs2:/home/jmneedham#


not sure why this is not working :-)

Well, that is because I didn't know linux-sound-base is not present in sarge.. it is in testing and unstable. Try anyway with alsaconf, and see if that works.

Alsa Did not fix it
 

Hello:

I ran alsaconf as requested and it couldn't find my soundcard...

This is the integrated Dell Crystal Semiconductor CS4236... not sure what SuSE was using but both Knoppix and SuSE detect it and use it... since that is the case, Debian should also but I am very new at doing something so drastic as to recompile the kernel myself... The sound thing is probably the most important item to get running for me.

Thanks and I hope we can solve it.

This problem is solved :-) Thanks for the help.

Could you post how you fixed it for others?

How it was solved
 

The problem was the modules weren't being loaded at boot time and I had not installed the alsa utils package (which above was suggested, so that was helpful on the way).

I executed two modprobe statements:

modprobe snd-cs4236 (this is my soundcard driver discovered through dmesg)
modprobe snd-seq-oss (not sure why this was helpful, but a friend in my local LUG suggested this)

afterwards tested using aplay (alsa play) at the command line with a file from /usr/share/sounds (any one will do)

then I modified /etc/modules to make sure the modules are loaded at boot time

added two lines:

snd-cs4236
snd-seq-oss

to the end of the list.

Sound is now working :-)