I have an athlon xp 2200+ on a MSI K7N2gM-L mobo with 512 MB DDR 400 RAM. I use the onboard GeForce4 MX Gfx but i have disabled the Onboard Audio. The BIOS version is 1.6. I run Fedora Core 3. mp3's and other non midi files play fine. But the MIDI ports are really in a mess. Thats because i've downloaded the latest alsa 1.0.8 packages and compiled them. After that i added a few lines to my modprobe.conf file to enable MIDI support. I can play midi at the console by mc'ing and pressing enter on a midi file. In X, kmid can play my External MIDI keyboard properly. It can also see the SB Live! Synths (4 of them to be precise) and i can even set them to be the default output device for MIDI. Problem is i can't hear anything when i do that. I have the snd-pcm-oss and snd-seq-oss modules loaded and only then does the MIDI ports get recognised. If i don't then the command aconnect -o produces a sequencer detection failure.

I have also tried Mandrake 10.1 and the MIDI works fine in all MIDI capable applications. I have actually managed to record a few trax in rosegarden using my external keyboard.

In addition ... both in Mandrake and Fedora the mixer sliders are extremely confusing to set up. The slider names and their functions do not seem to tally at all.

Does somebody have the solution or a good link to a howto that will ease my woes.

Thanks