Alright, I'm looking for some expert advice here, please.

I recently upgraded my motherboard and included on the motherboard is an integrated sound card using the Intel i810 chipset. For the past week I have been trying to get it configured to playback WAV sounds. Here is what I've done so far.

First, I tried the i810_audio driver that comes with Mandrake 9.0 (I'm using the 2.4.19-16 kernel). Using this sound driver, I can get CD audio perfectly. However, no other kinds of sounds. So, I tried installing the ALSA drivers, following the directions for the i810 chipset. When using the ALSA drivers, I get absolutely no sound (not even CD audio). So, I've reverted back to using the i810_audio driver again. Also, I've adjusted the permissions to 666 on /dev/dsp, /dev/sequencer and /dev/mixer. I've also tried using "cat somefile > /dev/dsp", "play somefile", sndconfig and esd in my attempts to make this work. So far, I've gotten nothing.

Also, when I use the i810_audio driver, XMMS locks up when attempting to play anything other than a CD. However, when using the ALSA drivers, it at least acts like it's playing, even though no sound is coming out of my speakers. I have checked to make sure that the sound card works by playing sounds in Windows.

Does anyone have any ideas? I'd really like this to work so I can listen to my MP3 collection and perhaps play some games as well.

If anyone can help me out, I'd greatly appreciate it.

Thanks

Try 2 things:

1. Launch whatever program you have to adjust the volume (can't remember what it's called) and put the speaker and PCM volume right up. If you can adjust the volume trom the keyboard (BIOS), put that right up too. Can you hear the hiss though the speakers?

2. launch a wav player or mp3 player from the command line:

mpg123 FunkyMusic.mp3

and have a look at what it says.

Bert

Thank you for your advice. All of my mixer settings are up to full (I forgot to mention that I had already adjusted those). However, I did as you asked and ran the mpg123 program. Here is the output:

/dev/dsp: No such device
/dev/dsp: No such device
/dev/dsp: No such device
/dev/dsp: No such device
/dev/dsp: No such device
/dev/dsp: No such device
/dev/dsp: No such device
audio: No such device

Obviously that's not good. Do you have any idea on how to fix that? There is a dsp entry in my /dev directory, but I don't know how to set it up. Any more help is greatly appreciated.

Thanks.

Well, I installed the ALSA drivers and I no longer get the /dev/dsp does not exist error. In fact, I get no errors, just no sound. I've followed the directions on the ALSA site for the i810 chipset to no avail. Also, I've manually done "modprobe snd-pcm-oss" just to see what happens. So far, nothing.

If anyone has any further suggestions, I'd appreciate it.

Thanks!

Is there a soundcard entry in the output of the command

dmesg

?

These are the entries from dmesg that seem to relate to my soundcard:

ICH2: IDE controller on PCI bus 00 dev f9
ICH2: chipset revision 18
ICH2: not 100% native mode: will probe irqs later
intel8x0: clocking to 48000

As far as there being an entry saying "soundcard", there isn't anything in there.

How about the ouput of the command

lspci

any reference to an audio controller there?

There is an entry for my soundcard in the lspci command.

00:1f.5 Multimedia audio controller: Intel corp 82801BA/BAM AC'97 Audio (rev 12)

Thanks for all of your help so far.

Well, I finally got the sound to work using a rather ugly hack, so I was wondering if I could get a little bit more help.

This is what I have to do to get sound working:
Let the computer boot with the OSS driver (i810_audio)
Log in
su as root
Unload all of the audio drivers
Use modprobe to load the snd-intel8x0 ALSA driver
Unload all of the ALSA drivers (including snd and soundcore)
Use modprobe to load the i810_audio driver again

This works every time, but I have to do it every time I reboot the computer. I've double-checked what modules are loaded before and after doing this (using lsmod) and have not come up with any differences. The only thing I can think of (and didn't check) was to see if there were any new processes running after performing the steps above.

Does anyone know why I would have to do this in order to get my sound to work? Also, at the very least, I would like to know what script I could place these steps in so that I don't have to do it manually every time I reboot.

Thanks in advance.