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Old 01-28-2003, 12:31 PM   #1
tmbowie16
LQ Newbie
 
Registered: Jan 2003
Location: Southampton, England, UK
Distribution: Ubuntu
Posts: 17

Rep: Reputation: 0
Exclamation Sound Problems with Debian


I'm fairly new to Linux and trying it out on an old spare machine.
I am running Debian 3.0-r0 (Woody) with Kernel 2.4.18-bf24.
KDE Version 2.2.2.

The hardware generally works quite well, however I am unable to get the sound to work.

When I boot into KDE 2.2.2 I get one of the following two error messages:

Error: cannot load /dev/dsp, /dev/dsp not found
Error: cannot access /dev/dsp, device or resource busy

This occurs whether I log on as root or a user.

Also, the KDE sound server crashes if settings in Control Centre>Sound>Sound Server are changed and the server restarted, or when the "Test Sound" button is clicked.

----------------

Here are the basic specs of the machine:

Intel Pentium-166 MMX
64MB RAM
PC-Chips M507 mobo w/ onboard graphics and sound:
Graphics = SiS 5597/5598 PCI 4MB
xx SOUND = Cmedia 8330 ISA-PNP device xx
(etc etc....)

-----------------
The following is the contents of /etc/modules:

binfmt_misc
binfmt_aout
cpuid
imm
lp
gameport
analog
ns558
keybdev
mousedev
joydev
sb
cmpci
apm
msr
smbfs
ipx
ppp_generic
ppp_synctty

As you can see, both the Soundblaster module "sb" and the Cmedia module "cmpci" are there, as I was very careful to load these as modules upon installation.
I therefore see no reason to recompile the kernel.

The isapnp module appears to be detecting the card fine according to the kernel log:

isapnp: Scanning for PnP cards...
isapnp: Calling quirk for 01:03
isapnp: CMI8330 quirk - fixing interrupts and dma
isapnp: Card 'CMI8330. Audio Adapter'
isapnp: 1 Plug & Play card detected total

The following is the kernel log generated for the sb and cmpci modules:

sb: CMI8330. Audio Adapter detected
sb: ISAPnP reports 'CMI8330. Audio Adapter' at i/o 0x220, irq 5, dma 1, 5
SB 4.13 detected OK (220)
sb: 1 SoundBlaster PnP card(s) found
cmpci: version $Revision: 5.64 $ time (...etc etc)

-------------

Checking cat /proc/interrupts reveals no conflicts or sharing, and the sound only has one entry:


5: 8193 XT-PIC soundblaster

Checking cat /proc/dma reveals no problems either (this is the entire output):

1: SoundBlaster8
4: cascade
5: SoundBlaster 16

-------------

I have also applied the following commands:

chmod 777 /dev/dsp
chmod 777 /dev/mixer (changing file permissions for devices)
ls -s /dev/dsp /dev/sound (an attempt to get sound working as recommended on a different site)

/dev/dsp and /dev/mixer appear to be there most of the time, but occasionally are lost.

-------------

I have edited /etc/group file and changed the "audio" line as follows:

audio:x:29: (user) to add my user account to the audio permissions

-------------

ls -l /dev/dsp reveals the following:
crwxrwxrwx 1 root audio 14, 3 Mar 14 2002 /dev/dsp

ls-l /dev/mixer reveals exactly the same.

-------------

lsof /dev/dsp reveals the following process running all the time:
COMMAND PID USER FD TYPE DEVICE SIZE NODE NAME
artsd 399 root 7u CHR 14,3 744631 /dev/dsp

-------------

I have also installed "aumix" as well, although this does not appear to achieve anything.

-------------

If anyone has any ideas why the sound is not working, based on the above information, please let me know.
I hope that the problem is obvious to a more experienced linux user, I have tried to explain what I have done and checked and what I have tried to do. Are there any potential conflicts with modules or the ORDER of modules in /etc/modules?

Is it a problem with artsd being run all the time and stopping other processes from accessing the sound, or a kde/artsd config problem or kernel config problem??

Any information about how artsd works or other ways to configure the sound would be gratefully received, along with other things to check: I have only checked the above, based upon help pages on the internet.

Thankyou in advance for any help,
Tom
 
Old 01-28-2003, 05:33 PM   #2
finegan
LQ Guru
 
Registered: Aug 2001
Location: Dublin, Ireland
Distribution: Slackware
Posts: 5,700

Rep: Reputation: 72
First off, Incredible listing! I see way to many threads where the breadth of it is: I can't get sound to work...

Its an old ISA card, so nothing ever works on autodetect, you usually just have to track down the module and modprobe it by hand and pray. From what I sound googling for the card, its just another SB clone, but since it didn't have a very long shelf life, who knows if the 2.4.x driver works right, one way to find out:

modprobe sb

If that horks... you might have to hand feed it DMA and IRQ arguments. Unfortunately the best resource I found was this:

http://www.linuxnorge.com/hjelp/Fell..._howto_no.html

Yeah, I think thats Norwegian? Maybe, but the commands are in english!

Cheers,

Finegan
 
  


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