will somebody pl. tell me how to use alsa driver
do i have to get its drivers from the net or do they come with the distribution
i am using redhat 9.0

go to www.alsa-project.org and read the docs there.
also, please use the search-function; most likely others
with redhat have tried to install asla as well. good luck.

i downloaded the latest drivet for alsa and installed it
i also installed alsa for xmms
then also when i choose o/p plugin as alsa in xmms
it gives the error as 'snd_mixer_attach'
no such device etc etc.
pl. somebody who has worked in alsa

I have a further question: To use ALSA, do you only need to download and install the drivers, or is there software that is needed as well? When I looked at their homepage, it just wasn't clear to me. I'm very new at Linux, so maybe I'm missing an important concept.

There is a soundcard matrix there. It will have info on installing ALSA for your card. It will give you the exact syntax to use to configure and install the card, which packages you will need and how to get thing going.

You'll probably need:
alsa-driver
alsa-lib
alsa-utils

And Gurduloo, your distro comes with ALSA by default, you shouldn't need to do anything but adjust your volume.

Cool

I have a Vortex 1 card, which the ALSA matrix says may or may not work... I hadn't realized Mandrake 9.1 comes with ALSA, though. I've seen lots of posts where people hadn't realized the sound is muted - maybe that's been my problem.

Ok, I checked it out and I do have Alsa installed - but no driver for my Vortex 1 card. I have been trying unsuccessfully to install a driver for this card, but I had been trying with an Aureal driver I downloaded from sourceforge.net, instead of an Alsa driver. There is a newer project called OpenVortex which reportedly makes an Alsa driver for my card, but I can't figure out what files to download and what to do with the files. Could anyone look over this site and help me out?

http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/openvortex/

In my personal experience (though long ago) I had one helluva time getting audio to work with my Vortex card, however there appears to be much improvement since then. What you can do is checkout files from their cvs (click the cvs link on their page for more info) and try working with those. However, since it's not nearly even close to stable/public release, you may not find that anything is of value to you from there.

That is actually what prompted me to buy my SB LIve card way back when I did. Nice cards I must say, and definitely supported in linux.

Good Luck

Cool