Don't forget also
Are you sure the speakers or headphones are plugged into the correct output?
Are they on and is any volume control
they may have turrned up?
The most probable cause for a condition like "the card is properly detected but you don't hear anything" is not because there's a problem with the card, but because there's a problem with the subsystem that makes the sound audible to the user.
Now as to the problem of it being "AC'97" (which the
Chaintech site confirms):
Audio Subsystem
* With external high quality 5.1-Channel AC'97 Codec
* Complete software driver supports for Windows OS
* Optional S/PDIF out function
This is actually incomplete information. The thing is, there is not just one AC'97 codec that works for everything. Several different motherboard types and modems use variations on the AC'97 codec, and many sound chips that are not 'pure' AC'97 use AC'97 support code (as it is supposed to be a standard of some sort).
I have a VIA KM266A-based board, and the onboard sound is from the VIA 8233 Southbridge, using AC'97--
VIA AC'97, which has a specific kernel driver. ATI motherboards (yes, they make mobos too, apparently) with onboard sound have their own special AC'97 driver in the kernel, and Intel/SiS/nVidia/AMD/ALI based-boards have
two special drivers: one for "regular" sound chips, and one for integrated modem chips which double as sound cards.
Since I can't find any information indicating that this mobo uses an outside audio chipset, I can only assume that it's using the nForce 2 Ultra MCPS Southbridge for sound, which theory is supported by the name of the Windows drivers offered on the Chaintech site (
Cmidia AC'97 Codec Drivers). This name would seem like it's a merging of "C" for Chaintech and "idia" for Nvidia-- except that doesn't account for the "M".
"CM" plus "idia" suggests that this chip might be a variation on one of the C-Media chipsets, heavily customized by Nvidia (you really only see C and M together in relation to sound chip names when C-Media is involved). That
strongly suggests that there is likely an additional special kernel module needed for support of this chipset, as does the fact that Chaintech themselves provide a specialized driver for Windows.
That sent me to the nVidia site, to check out the contents of their nForce drivers. This is what I found:
Quote:
Other distributions
If the distribution you are using provides a configuration mechanism for audio drivers, use it to select the nvsound driver module for use with the nForce audio device. Otherwise, manually edit the module configuration file.
If your configuration file already contains an entry for the i810_audio, snd-intel8x0, or nvaudio drivers (open-source audio drivers that supports the nForce audio controller), that entry needs to be commented out with a # or removed:
# alias sound-slot-0 i810_audio
Add the following line to the configuration file:
alias sound-slot-0 nvsound
On some distributions, you may need to replace sound-slot-0 with snd-card-0.
If you wish to have nvmixer audio settings automatically restored each time the nvsound driver loads, add the following lines to the configuration file for 2.4 kernels:
post-install nvsound sleep 1; /usr/bin/nvmix-reg -f /etc/nvmixrc -L >/dev/null 2>&1 ||:
pre-remove nvsound /usr/bin/nvmix-reg -f /etc/nvmixrc -S >/dev/null 2>&1 ||:
For 2.6 kernels:
install nvsound /sbin/modprobe --ignore-install nvsound ; sleep 1; /usr/bin/nvmix-reg -f /etc/nvmixrc -L >/dev/null 2>&1 || :
remove nvsound { /usr/bin/nvmix-reg -f /etc/nvmixrc -S >/dev/null 2>&1 || : ; }; /sbin/modprobe -r --ignore-remove nvsound
For both 2.4 and 2.6 kernels, you should also edit /etc/rc.d/init.d/halt, or /etc/init.d/halt.local on SuSE distributions:
if grep -q "\(nvsound\)" /proc/modules && [ -x /usr/bin/nvmix-reg ]; then
/usr/bin/nvmix-reg -f /etc/nvmixrc -S >/dev/null 2>&1
fi
For Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 and Fedora Core 3, add the following line in /etc/rc.local:
/usr/bin/nvmix-reg -f /etc/nvmixrc -L >/dev/null 2>&1
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So what we can learn from this snippet is:
1) you can use the kernel's snd-intel_8x0 drivers if you want-- so if that is not the kernel module that you are loading, you should be;
2) Whatever driver you downloaded (why you downloaded a supposed
audio driver for a
nVidia-based board by
Chaintech from the
Realtek site-- as Realtek is best known for network cards, and there is no indication that Realtek has anything to do with the audio chip on either this Chaintech board or nForce2 boards in general-- I cannot fathom), you'd likely do better to download and compile the
nVidia drivers from
their site at
http://www.nvidia.com/object/linux.html rather than anything else (if you want to use an outside driver at all);
3) Fedora Core 3 needs special handling to use at least the nVidia nForce drivers (so it might need special treatment to handle the open-source variants as well).
Hope this helps.
