Hello,

I installed Linux on a dual-boot P4 (ASUS P4S8X-X motherboard). Everything works under WinXP, but there's no sound under Linux. The OS recognizes the onboard SIS7012 chip as an Intel i810, and assigns the IRQ with no problems. lspci shows the board as running with no problems.

If I plug my speakers on the microphone jack, however, the sound works - so it's not really a 'configuration' problem. My guess is that I need new drivers, but I have not been able to find anything.

The P4S8X-X is listed as tested and approved for Linux. Can anyone help me?

Thanks,
Pedro

Several people have reported this sound-out-of-the-microphone-jack phenomenon in this forum, on a variety of m/b's and sound chips but always the i810 driver. I can only assume whoever wrote the driver got their wires crossed.

People using the ALSA i810 driver, like me, have the sound coming out of the correct place. Unfortunately many other posts describe prolonged struggles to install ALSA, especially for redhat/mandrake.

Take your pick :-)

After reinstalling RH9 three times, I'm using Knoppix until I figure out what's wrong. I tried ALSA (w/ Knoppix), but it still doesn't work. Any suggestions?

Knoppix is a good choice for checking out ALSA. Googling for "SIS7012" with "ALSA" shows up a number of people having problems. Do your sound apps run without sound, or just quit?

Couple of things to look at:

1. ALSA mutes everything by default. In alsamixer you have to unmute each channel (key 'M'), not just turn it up.

2. KDE may have the ARTSD sound server running. This seems to be incompatible with several popular apps e.g. xmms, mplayer. More basic things like mpg123 are OK, or just 'killall artsd'.

3. Sometimes the sound doesn't come from the obvious channels, so best unmute and turn up everything in sight.

Thanks for the tips, but it didn't work... ALSA loaded fine (apparently) and recognized the SIS7012 as Intel i810; I unmuted all channels but still no sound. This is extremely frustrating!

Shame to give up now! I am running out of ideas on what your problem might be, but there a couple more diagnostic things you could try.

1. Run 'lsmod' command. This lists the installed modules. With ALSA you should see the following:

Module Size Used by Not tainted
snd-seq-oss 29472 0 (unused)
snd-seq-midi-event 3016 0 [snd-seq-oss]
snd-seq 37488 2 [snd-seq-oss snd-seq-midi-event]
snd-pcm-oss 39940 0
snd-mixer-oss 13720 1 [snd-pcm-oss]
snd-intel8x0 18244 1
snd-pcm 61120 0 [snd-pcm-oss snd-intel8x0]
snd-timer 14628 0 [snd-seq snd-pcm]
snd-ac97-codec 40264 0 [snd-intel8x0]
snd-page-alloc 5020 0 [snd-intel8x0 snd-pcm]
snd-mpu401-uart 3440 0 [snd-intel8x0]
snd-rawmidi 13376 0 [snd-mpu401-uart]
snd-seq-device 4256 0 [snd-seq-oss snd-seq snd-rawmidi]
snd 29028 0 [snd-seq-oss snd-seq-midi-event snd-seq snd-pcm -oss snd-mixer-oss snd-intel8x0 snd-pcm snd-timer snd-ac97-codec snd-mpu401-uart snd-rawmidi snd-seq-device]

If you don't get this then ALSA has not loaded.

2. Run xmms on an mp3 file. To be safe first kill the artsd daemon (if this is Knoppix/KDE) with

% killall artsd

then

% xmms somemusic.mp3

Are the fake LEDs jiggling around? This might give some clue to the location of the problem.

Okay, let's keep trying, and thanks SO MUCH for your help! Here's lsmod output:
Module Size Used by Not tainted
snd-pcm-oss 35588 0 (autoclean)
autofs4 8724 1 (autoclean)
af_packet 13448 0 (autoclean)
nls_iso8859-1 2876 0 (autoclean)
ntfs 50848 0 (autoclean)
snd-mixer-oss 11160 0 (autoclean) [snd-pcm-oss]
snd-intel8x0 16644 0 (autoclean)
snd-pcm 53888 0 (autoclean) [snd-pcm-oss snd-intel8x0]
snd-timer 13352 0 (autoclean) [snd-pcm]
snd-ac97-codec 31776 0 (autoclean) [snd-intel8x0]
snd-page-alloc 4320 0 (autoclean) [snd-intel8x0 snd-pcm]
snd-mpu401-uart 2960 0 (autoclean) [snd-intel8x0]
snd-rawmidi 12256 0 (autoclean) [snd-mpu401-uart]
snd-seq-device 3748 0 (autoclean) [snd-rawmidi]
snd 25828 0 (autoclean) [snd-pcm-oss snd-mixer-oss snd-intel8x0 snd-pcm snd-timer snd-ac97-codec snd-mpu401-uart snd-rawmidi snd-seq-device]
soundcore 3364 3 (autoclean) [snd]
agpgart 34592 0 (unused)
sis900 12460 1
serial 51844 0 (autoclean)
hid 19268 0 (unused)
mousedev 3832 1
input 3168 0 [hid mousedev]
printer 7680 0 (unused)
usb-ohci 18152 0 (unused)
usbcore 57376 1 [hid printer usb-ohci]
apm 9768 2
rtc 6908 0 (autoclean)
cloop 7940 2

I checked that artsd is not running. When I run xmms, I get the following message:
"libxml.so.1: cannot open shared object file: no such file or directory"

BUT: the player screen appears, and the fake leds do jiggle around. Any new suggestions?

Again, thanks A LOT.

Plenty of things still to try. But as I do not have your setup I am groping in the dark. I was hoping someone with a similar system would have the right answer. Anyway, there are RPMs for ALSA + RH at

http://freshrpms.net/docs/alsa/

The site is putting up a 'closed due to software patents' page but it lets you in if you click the link at the bottom. This has instructions for using the ALSA RPM packages.

Otherwise you can try to compile ALSA from source. Generally a bit of unix experience helps here.

Or maybe it is not so bad to have sound coming out of the mic socket

P.S. If xmms is jiggling LEDs it strongly suggests the problem is at the mixer or hardware level. Definitely no MM over the channels in alsamixer???? Weird.

You might also have a look through this thread:

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...111#post323111

I've been "on the bird" about three weeks now and had the same install probs.

I never got sound with knoppix, except by installing OSS. http://www.opensound.com/ (I am not endorsing this product, but it did make sound come out of my speakers for the test.) Unfortunately on reboot the sound was gone.

I finally got sound with my Red Hat 9 install--the third install--by installing the SNDCONFIG for legacy drivers which is NOT in the same location as the PNP "RedHat sndconfig" RPM. ***Also, I had to unplug my webcam because sndconfig seems to work in a linear way, with yes no protocol. Apparently sndconfig would find my sound-enabled (microphoned) D-link web camera, tell me it had no drivers for it, and then give up looking for my ess1868 [legacy] sound drivers.

Once installed, open a terminal and login as su, then type sndconfig and hit enter. The reason I mention this is that the GUI "Soundcard Detection" did not find my legacy soundccard and may not be meant to. I figure this "tool" must be for PNP soundcard detection only.

The point is, unless you are using a pci soundcard, you'll need the legacy sndconfig RPM installed. This comes with Red Hat 9 and is down past the K-desktop crap, but before the Developer RPM packages. I'm on the Windows side of my box, so I can't get to the RPM now and be more exact about location. I hope this helped.

Good luck!

I made it work! It took me three days to figure it out, but I managed to make alsa work, and I didn't even had to recompile the kernel!

I followed the steps described in www.freshrpms.net, they have the binary RPM's for the driver and an explanation on how to make it work. Don't ask me what I did, I just followed the steps... (but hey, it worked!"