Ive been trying to get sound working for about a week now in this computer with no luck
Ive tried different distros, FC4 and FC6 and now i am onto Ubuntu 6.06 and none of these will pickup the sound card.

It definitely works. It worked in windows and DSL 3.0.1 installs the maestro driver and works fine.

I have been following the guide at http://doc.gwos.org/index.php/Compre...olutions_Guide

with no luck

aplay -l

gives:

aplay: device_list:221: no soundcards found...

lcpci -v

gives:

0000:00:08.0 Multimedia audio controller: ESS Technology ES1978 Maestro 2E (rev 10)
Subsystem: Compaq Computer Corporation Armada M700/E500
Flags: medium devsel, IRQ 11
I/O ports at 3000 [size=256]
Capabilities: <available only to root>

I have tried using two different drivers
snd-es1968
and
snd-maestro3 (since DSL uses this)
and none of them seem to work

alsamixer

alsamixer: function snd_ctl_open failed for default: No such device


I am starting to run out of ideas..

If I dont get a solution to this problem soon, my wife will make me put windows back on this laptop heaven forbid!!

Have you tried running 'alsaconf'? It's the console based configuration utility for alsa. Then run 'alsamixer' to unmute everything, and finally 'alsactl store' to store the new mixer settings. Make sure you unmute the output jack if it shows up in alsamixer. Highlight the control and press M to mute/unmute. Really, if it works in DSL it should work in any Linux distro.

Hope that helps.

Thanks for the reply.

A lot of people in other posts say to use this step but there is no alsaconf in ubuntu.

apparently alsactl can do the same thing but I cant figure out how to make it work...

If anyone knows how to configure the sound card with alsactl or any other ideas, they would be appricated

I see that's an ESS-1968. I had an ESS-1869 years ago, and it was an ISA card. Assuming yours is ISA too that may explain why the setup isn't done automatically by Ubuntu. I still think Ubuntu should have the standard console utilities though.

Anyway, here's a link to the official ALSA setup for that card:
http://www.alsa-project.org/alsa-doc...&module=es1968

Update: Sorry! This is the setup for the maestro driver that dsl sets up for you:
http://www.alsa-project.org/alsa-doc...odule=maestro3

Those instructions are quite generic though, and to me they often seem generated. If running an official release of Ubuntu I would think that you could safely skip the part about compiling the alsa libraries/utilities/drivers. Just pay attention to the part about modprobe.conf.

A note (from me) about modprobe.conf though.. /etc/modprobe.conf has been deprecated, so you may need to create a file like /etc/modprobe.d/sound instead. If /etc/modprobe.conf fails, try /etc/modprobe.d/sound. If the directory /etc/modprobe.d doesn't exist then Ubuntu may be doing things differently. The file /etc/modules.conf is used for Linux 2.4 based systems, so that will probably not apply to any Ubuntu system.

Anyway, I'm using Slackware Linux which is a totally different distro. I've been helping Ubuntu users before, and I wish Ubuntu would include some basic utilities that could be useful when all the automatic voodoo fails. I'll just hope this helps.

Regards

Thanks guys for the replys.

What a headache this has been.

I cant get the alsadriver to compile as ubuntu doesnt come with a compiler installed.
After installing gcc and make it still wont compile as it needs the kernel source.

I tried downloading alsaconf and running that.

Using alsaconf I have tried all the different drivers starting with ESS.
Alsaconf will try and install what ever driver I choose, but it is still returning an error

I just cant understand why DSL will setup the soundcard no problems but other top class distros
like fedora and ubuntu dont want to know about it.

Any other ideas would be great.

From this howto:
http://www.martin-bock.de/pc/pc-0310.html

That's a PCI card. your lspci output should have told me that, sorry. It seems the module snd_es1968 worked for the writer of the above howto on the Compaq Armada M700.

alsaconf is part of the package alsa-utils. You could even try looking for that package in Ubuntu's software collection. A friend of mine uses that system, so I know there is a huge collection of software. Just downloading the script alsaconf by itself will likely not work because it will be missing some dependencies.

That's right. In order to compile drivers you need the kernel source tree that was used to compile your kernel. Ubuntu should distribute that package, and its name will likely be kernel-source-something. Ubuntu is based on Debian, right? In that case I remember having tried to find a matching kernel source tree for Debian with no luck. It then requires some work to make the kernel source match the running kernel. I never found out how to do that before switching back to Slackware.

As a last resort try reinstalling your system so you know that your changes aren't affecting anything, and if the alsa-utils package exists for Ubuntu try to install that first. Then run alsaconf. You may not have to compile anything to make it work.

Still no further ahead with this problem.

I tried compiling a custom kernel and that still didn't make any difference.
Would it have anything to do with the fact that DSL linux runs a 2.4 kernel as
apposed to ubuntu and Fedora which run 2.6 ?
Maybe the 2.6 kernel has a problem with the maestro or es drivers

bit of an update:

I have tried different distros (on live cd's)
Xubuntu, puppy, dsl, knoppix.

The only ones that my sound card will will work with is dsl and knoppix both running
2.4.X kernels. Anything running a 2.6.X kernel doesn't work.

Does anyone know why that would be?