hello again,
once again a newbie in trouble. i have an old ibm thinkpad 390 that i just installed mdk 9.1 on. i installed xmms to play mp3's and cd's but i am getting no sound out of the speakers. The player seems 2 function ok and i see the cd is being accessed but no sound. the control center says it has installed the alsa driver for sound card but that's it. being from windows world i am baffled.any suggestions would sure help me out.

thanx alan

Uhm. You just installed MDK, right? If your sound card doesn't give any error on startup you should know that when you install ALSA it mutes your sound card... you only have to open any mixer (type alsamixer from console if you installed also ALSA-utils, or maybe also Kmix in KDE should work) and unmute your sound

enjoy

I typed alsamixer @ prompt and got a no file present response. then I installed the alsaplayer succesfully and retyped the alsamixer command and got a message of "func snd-ctl-open failed for default: no such device". Huh???? man.Windows was never this cryptic. anyhow i looked in mandrake cc under hardware and it says i'm using magic media 256 av card. When i look in the regular control center under peripherals it says installed drivers type 10 :alsa emulation card config:no soundcards. Huh?? I have a soundcard but i dont? i'm using an old ibm thinkpad 390 i wish i had the hardware specs but the hd went south unexpectedly and i installed only linux 2 force myself 2 learn it. any advice on where to go would be appreciated....

thanx
alan

p.s. on above post. i installed the kdemultimedia program and i can play cd but still no sound. when i start kdemix i dont see any slider bars to adjust volume like help says i should. is there something i have to do to get sound working initially.

thanx again
alan

first thing to try is to turn up the volume in aumix - it's under multimedia->sound in the menu. Turn up *everything* that you can. Mandrake9.1. by default mutes everything. Most of the time this is the only problem.

when i run aumix from the menu it just starts in taskbar w/hourglass 4 several seconds then quits. when i run aumix from Konsole w/-v 100 option i get "aumix: error opening mixer". is there maybe a different driver i need 4 the sound crd? or the fact that the kde cd player starts mean it sees correct driver 4 sound card? any and all suggestions welcome. in windows it easy 2 check hardware config and see if there is any problems. is there any command or some file i can check 2 see if my soundcard is functioning ok...

alan

open a terminal and as root do
draksound
this will start the soundcard configuration tool of mandrake. If there are drivers other than the one you're currently using available, they will appear in the pulldown menu.