I have an Analog Devices 1881A on board sound chip on a Sony Vaio PCV-RX560. Mandrake 9.0 has recognized it and Kmix indicates that it knows that the card exists and all channels are unmuted. Mandrakes Hardware detection also shows that the card exists and lists all attributes and related driver (right off hand I don't recall which it is but will update this when I get home tonight.) However, I am unable to get any sound. If I use the KDE sound server configuration utility and choose the ALSA driver I am greeted with the following error: device: default can't be opened for playback (No such file or directory). When using AutoDetect it seems to be happy for awhile and then I get some sort of sound server fatal error: cpu overload, aborting; error. Last night I accidentally bumped the mic and heard the sound through the speakers so I know that at least that portion is working. I thought perhaps the mic was using up the resources so I muted it in Kmix and went as far as unplugging it, but still no sound can be heard. I have had all versions of Mandrake on this machine since 7.2 and haven't had any sound. I'm starting to get a bit frustrated with this Sony.

QUESTION: Is there something simple that I am overlooking? Or should I abandon this on board sound card for a real PCI card that is truly compatible? If I do go with a real PCI sound card, which cards are recommended?

Thanks In Advance,

A real PCI sound card is always the $20 solution to the 40 hour problem... but don't give up on this kid just yet, what's the output of: /sbin/lspci ? I'll look up all the evil info on the chipset.

Cheers,

Finegan

Finegan,

Here are the results of the /usr/bin/lspci run (Sound Info Only)
00:1f.5 Multimedia audio controller: Intel Corp. 82801BA/BAM AC'97 Audio (rev 12)

Also, according to Mandrake Control Center:
The current sound driver is i810_audio. It doesnt seem to want to give me the option to use ALSA.

I received the cpu overload error again on boot up tonight as well and the mic is not plugged in.

Thank You very much for your time,

you might want to disable the arts sound mixer in KDE and see if that gets rid of the freakout message, if the command:

/sbin/lsmod

has i810_audio loaded then I'm at a bit of a loss too, the driver is there, are there any freakout messages in "dmesg"?

Sorry this is a bit of fumbling.

Cheers,

Finegan

Finegan,

I haven't tried disabling Kmix yet. However, there was some sort of error message in dmesg. Right off the top of my head I don't recall the error. As soon as I get a chance I'll copy that message to you. Maybe you or someone else has seen it before.

Thank You Again For Your Assistance,