I am geting so fed up with this ac'97 sound card

Can anyone help to get it running on my redhat linux 8.0?

it would help if you'd describe your hardware.

I have a MSI mainboard k7 with the via ac'97 sound card built in it it works in windowz fine but redhat finds it but dosnt play any music or sound of any sort

i have tryed alsa but there is no .exe file to run it

you can see that i am a at this linux lark

i an only 13 years old so go easy on me!

I have a MSI KT3 and tried for weeks to get the ac 97 sound working including alsa and never got it to work. I went out and bought a really cheap c-media card popped it in, loaded the driver modules and works perfectly.

I've a lot of ac97 sound problems posted on this site so I was more than a little worried if I'd ever get sound working on an old Compaq I inhertied at work that had the ac97 sound support built into the m'board. BUT, the ALSA driver does work. So you should be able to get this working. It may take a bit of effort though.

First of all, make sure that you have modular sound support by issuing the command:

/sbin/lsmod | grep soundcore

or

/sbin/modinfo soundcore

If nothing is returned, we may have a problem. But nothing that can't be solved.

BTW, have you been to the ALSA web site, downloaded the latest drivers , the library, and utilities? (Save them into someplace like, say, /usr/local/src.) Take a crack at reading the documentation. If it's overwhelming, you know where to ask questions, eh?

MSI appears to have made about a dozen different K7-based m'boards. Their products that have ``KT3'' in the model number appear to all be either VIA VT8235- or VT8233A-based. Both of these chips are supported using the ALSA via82xx driver. You might want to pop open the cover on the system and look on the m'board for a chip that has a similar part number just to be sure we're talking about the correct chip. Or if the m'board user manual is handy it should have this chip number as well.

Later...

Rick

Here you guys go.....i found this a while ago, used it for mandrake and still use some of it now for slackware. You must get the drivers, library and utility.....run a ./configure, make, make install on the drivers then libraries, then utilities..then follow this......




To the pepple who use Via 8233 AC97 onBoard sound device on RedHat, Mandrake, SuSE Linux :

This is how to install the via drivers and unmute the device :

1 go to http://www.alsa-project.org/ to download the stable version.

2 Login as root. Type ntsysv to configure the service of alsasound, sound, to be automatically started in boot init.d

3 Restart the Linux
4 put the following lines in /etc/modules.conf:

# ALSA native device support
alias char-major-116 snd
alias snd-card-0 snd-card-via8233

# OSS/Free setup
alias char-major-14 soundcore
alias sound-slot-0 snd-card-0
alias sound-service-0-0 snd-mixer-oss
alias sound-service-0-1 snd-seq-oss
alias sound-service-0-3 snd-pcm-oss
alias sound-service-0-8 snd-seq-oss
alias sound-service-0-12 snd-pcm-oss

5 Type the command below to unmute all the channels

amixer set Master 22 unmute
amixer set Master Mono 22 unmute
amixer set Input Gain 22 unmute
amixer set Aux 22 unmute
amixer set Line 22 unmute
amixer set PCM 22 unmute

That step 5 is the sort of stuff that is sorely lacking on the ALSA site. Most of the driver support stops at step 4. ALSA is part of the 2.5.x kernels and going to be (so it appears) to be the sound driver when 2.6 comes out. IMHO, there's a lot of work on documentation, tutorials, etc. needed before people are going to be happy with ALSA. Good drivers but poor to middlin' documentation at this point though tons better than it was a couple of years ago. (Don't know who joined the dev team and is responsible for the beefed up the docs, but let's hope that person doesn't burn out.)

I'll have to try variations on those commands for my sound card and see what wonders they unlock.