SB live with Slackware 10.1 - half works!?
 

Ok, I'm new to Slackware and relatively new to GNU/Linux (about 2 months). I've used Debian, Ubuntu and SuSE 9.2 Pro so far. I'm checking out Slackware 10.1 and really like it so far. Here's the problem. When I installed Slackware, I had my Audigy LS installed just to see if it would work, I've never gotten it to work with any of the other distros I mentioned. It didn't. So I slapped in my old SB live which has worked with every distro I mentioned with no tweaking at all, just plug and play. With Slackare, an unusual problem has occurred. I have sound, I can aplay from a command prompt, I have system sounds, however, I can't adjust the volume from the volume control in the panel. When I try it just jumps back to the lowest setting when I drag it up. Also, if I try to launch volume control application from multimedia (using Gnome 2.6), I get the following message:

"Sorry, no mixer elements and/or devices found"

Obviously, there is a sound device running since I can play wave files and hear system sounds. Also, my CD player doesn't work, figure it has something to do with this issue. Maybe this is a Gnome issue...anyone have any ideas? I have never had any trouble getting an SB live to work with either Linux or Gnome, it always works by default. Thanks.

I had something similar happen in Fedora. XMMS was silent and playing really fast, but the Soundcard configuration played sounds fine. I went into XMMS Preferences, and set the output plugin to OSS. It was set to CD output or something else. Try doing that for the programs that are silent (except set it to ALSA if you use that).

Hope this helps.

Cheers

Ovalteen

Thanks for the response, unfortunately, my problem seems to run deeper than that. You did make me think of something else. In Gnome, under Applications>Desktop Preferences>Advanced>Multimedia Systems Selector, you have the option of selecting and testing what sound system - ALSA, OSS or ESS - is to be used. On all my other Linux installs, those have always been the options and they always work with the SB live. On this install (Slackware 10.1) the only thing listed is 'Custom' and it does nothing except cause the selector application to crash if you try to pipe (test) the sound. It's looking like my suspicions this issue may have been caused by my not having the SB live installed when I installed Slackware is probably what's causing this strange behavior. I can check this easily by installing Slackware on a spare 80 gig hard drive I have with the SB live in at the time of install to see if everything works doing it that way. Cheers.

How about typing "lspci"? Does that work on Slack? On my fedora system, the output contains a bunch of stuff and:
indicating my SB Live is installed.

If that works, give alsaconf a shot. It got my sound working.

Cheers

Ovalteen

If I run lspci, the SB is listed along with the game controller/midi port. This means that Slackware is aware of the card. Also ran alsaconf and alsamixer with no problems, the SB live is there and adjustable. Apparently some parts of Gnome are not aware of the card. Hmm....I wonder if this is a user permission issue? Maybe my normal user login isn't a member of the "audio" group, had this problem with Debian Woody one time. I'll check it out.

If it was a permissions problem, shouldn't alsaconf have had problems?

If it is though, the alsa website suggests:
Cheers

Ovalteen

OK, I figured it out, sort of. First off, the reason my CD player wasn't working is my normal user login was not a member of the cdrom group. I took care of that as well as some other group permissions. Apparently Slackware really limts by default what groups new user accounts have access to. Second, the sound problem only exists in Gnome. I launched KDE and everything works correctly. I don't know what's up with Gnome, it works OK with all the other distros I've used, well, actually SuSE didn't seem to like Gnome too much either. Debian and Ubuntu don't seem to have issues with it. Understandable with Ubuntu since it is optimized to work with Gnome, not sure about Debian other than it always seemed to work OK as well. I don't like the look of KDE as much as Gnome but I do prefer KDE as far as functionality goes. Thanks for your input, if nothing else you made me think of some things that would have taken me longer to get to left on my own. Cheers.

No worries :) . Glad to see you got it figured out.

Cheers

Ovalteen