I just installed Mandrake Linux, 2.4.19 I think...Anyways I have an oldish Compaq presario 1274 with an ESS1869 chipset soundcard, Everything works great right our of the gate, I just have no sound. I'm pretty sure that the Soundblaster drivers should work with this chipset and the sb drivers are in the kernal...I'm rather new to Linux and not sure how to get this working, and yea I RTFM. When I try to get info about my card through Drake it says no hardware detected. Any help would be greatly appreciated. And just mention it if I left out any important info... Thanks!

Have a look for your machine at linux-laptop.net.

thanks for pointing me in the right direction, I found this info:

Sound: Uses a ESS 1869 AudioDrive. This is how I did it, compile your kernel with sound as a module, OSS support as a module, 100% sound blaster compat as a module. Then load it like so. Note I don't have midi support loaded. haven't bothered to do it cuase I don't use it.

/sbin/modprobe sound
/sbin/modprobe sb io=0x220 irq=5 dma=1 dma16=5

Unfortunately I'm not sure how to do this...a man I'm guessing will tell me?

Ok, from the looks of that you need to load your sound modules the same way you would need to load the modules for an isa sound card, have a look at the isapnptools documentation, the modules should already be installed, it's just a matter of loading and configuring them.

ok I am really new at this and am not really understanding what I am doing, but I ran pnpdump with isapnp and it couldn't find my card, nor am I sure how to change and load modules, I'm trying to read up on this right now but am having troubles with understanding what the hell it is I'm trying to do...oh well....I'll keep trying...I now understand why Linuz hasnt taken off though

<rant>
Linux hasn't taken off because hardly anyone can buy a computer with it pre-installed and configured, and we all know who's to blame for that, so you have to work out how to get your hardware working yourself. This seems to be a daunting task when you first have at it, but once you get the pieces working together you'll be able to do it again in less time that it takes to install windows.
</rant>

Best thing to do at this stage is ask a specific question about the part your having trouble with now, and we like to see error messages in all their glory :-)

ok, first time Linux user here, and I also have a ESS Audo card (es 1869F chip). I just installed Mandrake 9.1 and the sound card wasnt working, so I've been reading these boards to try and figure out how to get it to work and here's what I did.
(i'm a windows user learning Linux, so please forgive the lack of my linux terminology). btw, I'm running the KDE GUI (3.1 i believe)

1. I used the advice from above, I opened a terminal (start --->terminals--->konsole)

2. at the command prompt (i guess its called bash prompt by linux users) type su , (which apparently gives you root access so you can modifiy stuff). Then enter in the appropriate password

3. at this point, i was still in my 'home' (/home/shamus) loged in as root, so i did a cd\ several times to get back to the root directory (think c:\ if you use windows)

4. i entered in:
/sbin/modprobe sound
and then
/sbin/modprobe sb io=0x220 irq=5 dma=1 dma16=5

(these commands are already listed in a previous post on this thread)

at this point the sound card still wasnt working, so I was fiddling around with the sound options in the control center. Here is what I did.

1. start ---> configuration ----> control center -----> sound ----> Sound system

2. in the aRTS tab of the sound system, the "start aRTS soundserver on KDE startup" was NOT checked, so I checked it. Hit apply.

3. I opened up Noatun the media player (start-->multimedia-->sound--->noatun) and picked a .mp3 to play and it worked.

Note: When i reboot, I have to do this all over again for some reason, but I'm just happy it works. Hopefully this may help somone else.

Note#2: I just wanted to post SPECIFICALLY what I did and what the results were. There may be unnecessary steps that dont need to be taken. If anyone can refine my process, please do.

Thanks to all the previous posters!!

Shamus.