I am running Fedora Core 1 on an Intel Pentium 4 machine, and I'm having trouble getting my sound card to work. When I run "Soundcard Detection" in System Settings, it detects an Intel 82801EB AC'97 Audio Controller with module i810_audio. But, when I click "Play Test Sound," I get the message "The i810_audio driver could not be loaded. This soundcard may not be compatible with Red Hat Linux."

I realize this is not very much information, but I'm new to Linux, so I don't really know where to look for more information.

Thanks for your help.

You need to get the drivers from ALSA for your onboard sound chip to work properly in Linux. Go to ->
http://www.alsa-project.org/alsa-doc...odule=intel8x0
and get your ALSA files and print the instructions. Download the 3 files on the main ALSA page to your /home/username directory and follow the instructions from this link. I don't use RedHat so I can't tell you any RPM stuff. Just compile from source with the simple steps on that page and you'll have your module. Don't be confused when you print the instructions and it says Intel i820 - it's the same drivers.

Then run ->
$ alsamixer (no need for root at this point)
and unmute all the channels (by using the M key) and turn up the volume using the up arrow key. Then after you exit alsamixer you should run ->
# alsactl store (as root)
to save the default ALSA mixer settings to be loaded at boot. NB: Don't turn your master volume up all the way until you've tested it. You may burst a speaker, or an eardrum

This worked for me with that sound chip in both Debian and Slackware. Don't know anything about Fedora, but it has a linux kernel so this should work for you, too.

I followed the instructions without any problems (except that /dev/midi wasn't created for some reason...), until I tried to run alsamixer. When I try to run it, I get "alsamixer: function snd_ctl_open failed for default: No such file or directory"

Do you know what this means? I tried puting a link to the alsaound rc startup script in rc5.d as S99alsasound and in rc0.d as K01alsasound. On startup, it said OK next to alsasound, but when I open Service Configuration, it says "ALSA sound driver not loaded."

Thanks for your help.

Please forgive me, but I don't know what that means. I had no trouble on my PC in either Debian or Slackware. However, I installed Slack on someone's laptop yesterday and at first they had sound by just uncommenting the proper sound module in /etc/rc.d/rc.modules. However, later on after I'd gone into his Windoze partition and worked there, then went back to Slack, the speakers screamed when I booted, and when I ran alsamixer to check the settings I got that same message. But on that laptop, I haven't installed ALSA.

Try searching here on LQ for that error, and also Googling. I'll do the same, but right now I have many things going on at once, and I won't give you a guess as an answer just to be posting.

There's one other thing. Read the instructions from ALSA again. They say ->
Maybe we must recompile our kernels.

All I had to do to get ALSA to work was go to the ALSA link and follow the instructions. Then the error message "alsamixer: function snd_ctl_open failed for default: No such file or directory" is gone.