Hello all, I just started Linux three days ago with Mandriva Linux 2006 (downloaded)

Here's my question: I have an external USB sound card (Creative Sound Blaster MP3+) and I wanted to get it working, plus an internal Intel AC'97 card. Mandriva was not recgonizing my external card, so I looked around and came across ALSA from alsa-project.org. After tinkering with it, I discovered that it had to be compiled against my kernel-sources (which did not come with my Mandriva download) so I downloaded that and then compiled ALSA. However, I later discovered that ALSA was supposedly already installed into the kernel, and it just need to be updated, but at this point none of my sound works on anything. I can't even get my snd module to load, nor soundcore. The modprobe.conf file continually tells me that the modules for ALSA do NOT exist, even though I've compiled them repeatedly.

Any suggestions on how to fix this mess?

Thanks all.

Alsa is a project on multiple levels. The latest version will eventually get folded into the latest kernel, but for those that have older kernels, it is often easier to download and install it ourselves.

To fix your mess, it would be easiest to delete the old alsa installation and install the new drivers into your kernel. For convenience, I have created rpms of these packages. I just haven't found a place to upload them to.

Since you have already downloaded and compiled alsa, did you install it (make install)? If not, that is part of the problem. After installing it, you should also download and install (in order) alsa-lib, and alsa-utils. Make and install each of these two packages, then run alsaconf to reconfigure your audio.