Can anyone help? I installed Debian Woody on my AMD 800 and everything works fine except the on board AC '97 Sound. It says some error about loading dev/s?? - it says it cant load the sound server. Any way I have disabled the onboard sound through BIOS and have now installed a cheap PCI Creative ES1371 sound card. It seems to have installed ok cos when I type "lspci" it states that is there on one of the PCI slots. So what I want to know is how do I reconfigure so as I can use this card??? Any help would be appreciated

I think there should be a dozen or so lines in the file /etc/modules.conf which describes your current setup, e.g. whether it is OSS or ALSA. If it is ALSA there should be some message there about being generated by ALSACONF. In this case you could try running the 'alsaconf' script (as root I guess).

Otherwise there is another script 'sndconfig' which may do the reconfiguration for OSS.

If you are not using ALSA, you might find that installing it instead of your current system also gets your old AC97 working.

Thanks for your reply,
Yes i did look at the modules.conf and this is all there was:


### update-modules: end processing /etc/modutils/actions

### update-modules: start processing /etc/modutils/aliases
# Aliases to tell insmod/modprobe which modules to use

# Uncomment the network protocols you don't want loaded:
# alias net-pf-1 off # Unix
# alias net-pf-2 off # IPv4
# alias net-pf-3 off # Amateur Radio AX.25
# alias net-pf-4 off # IPX
# alias net-pf-5 off # DDP / appletalk
# alias net-pf-6 off # Amateur Radio NET/ROM
# alias net-pf-9 off # X.25
# alias net-pf-10 off # IPv6
# alias net-pf-11 off # ROSE / Amateur Radio X.25 PLP
# alias net-pf-19 off # Acorn Econet

alias char-major-10-175 agpgart
alias char-major-10-200 tun
alias char-major-81 bttv
alias char-major-108 ppp_generic
alias /dev/ppp ppp_generic
alias tty-ldisc-3 ppp_async
alias tty-ldisc-14 ppp_synctty
alias ppp-compress-21 bsd_comp
alias ppp-compress-24 ppp_deflate
alias ppp-compress-26 ppp_deflate

# Crypto modules (see http://www.kerneli.org/)
alias loop-xfer-gen-0 loop_gen
alias loop-xfer-3 loop_fish2
alias loop-xfer-gen-10 loop_gen
alias cipher-2 des
alias cipher-3 fish2
alias cipher-4 blowfish
alias cipher-6 idea
alias cipher-7 serp6f
alias cipher-8 mars6
alias cipher-11 rc62
alias cipher-15 dfc2
alias cipher-16 rijndael
alias cipher-17 rc5


### update-modules: end processing /etc/modutils/aliases

### update-modules: start processing /etc/modutils/paths
# This file contains a list of paths that modprobe should scan,
# beside the once that are compiled into the modutils tools
# themselves.


### update-modules: end processing /etc/modutils/paths

### update-modules: start processing /etc/modutils/ppp
alias /dev/ppp ppp_generic
alias char-major-108 ppp_generic
alias tty-ldisc-3 ppp_async
alias tty-ldisc-14 ppp_synctty
alias ppp-compress-21 bsd_comp
alias ppp-compress-24 ppp_deflate
alias ppp-compress-26 ppp_deflate
### update-modules: end processing /etc/modutils/ppp

### update-modules: start processing /etc/modutils/setserial
#
# This is what I wanted to do, but logger is in /usr/bin, which isn't loaded
# when the module is first loaded into the kernel at boot time!
#
#post-install serial /etc/init.d/setserial start | logger -p daemon.info -t "setserial-module reload"
#pre-remove serial /etc/init.d/setserial stop | logger -p daemon.info -t "setserial-module uload"
#
alias /dev/tts serial
alias /dev/tts/0 serial
alias /dev/tts/1 serial
alias /dev/tts/2 serial
alias /dev/tts/3 serial
post-install serial /etc/init.d/setserial modload > /dev/null 2> /dev/null
pre-remove serial /etc/init.d/setserial modsave > /dev/null 2> /dev/null

### update-modules: end processing /etc/modutils/setserial

### update-modules: start processing /etc/modutils/arch/i386
alias parport_lowlevel parport_pc
alias char-major-10-144 nvram
alias binfmt-0064 binfmt_aout
alias char-major-10-135 rtc

### update-modules: end processing /etc/modutils/arch/i386


**There doesnt seem to be any reference to a sound device??
Any suggestions..

Are you a member of the audio group? To check groups in a console window will tell you if not a member of the groups su to root and adduser username audio you would have to logout and log back in for the changes to take effect. To get the right module loaded for the PCI card you would modprobe es1371 as root if it works then add the module name to the file /etc/modules and it will be loaded on boot. You may also want to check the permission on /dev/dsp I remember having to give the group r/w permission to get it to work what it should look like:

ok, ive added my username to the group

and ive loaded the alsaconf package, when i go to run alsaconf it says error running module snd ???
plus i dont know how to fill in all the details for the Vibra sound card, any clues??

blake

When you install alsaconf you should automatically also get required packages alsa-base and alsa-utils.

But I think you also need packages libasound2 and alsa-modules. Note that alsa-modules has to match your kernel version. This shouldn't be a problem if everything is coming from the same set of Woody CDs, unless you have compiled your own custom kernel.

I don't recall the details of what alsaconf needs to know. The module for the es1371 is called just that, or maybe snd-es1371. I used to use the same card, but changed to a new m/b a few months back.

i see exactly what your saying however when i do
apt-cache search alsa-modules, i get nothing. I spose this means i have to compile a new kernel - that sounds a little too difficult

blake

Strange that 'apt-cache search alsa-modules' does not show anything. Maybe you need to add something to your package source list in file /etc/apt/sources.list? How did you install this in the first place?