I am having trouble getting sound to work. I just installed Red Hat 6.1 and I'm using the Gnome desktop. I am new to Linux, so it is probably just a setting or somthing that I haven't found yet. Here is everything I know about it.

- When I boot up the computer I don't get any errors.

- When I load X I don't get any errors, but I don't have any sound.

- When I log out of X I get weird stuff like this:

/dev/dsp: No such device
/dev/dsp: No such device
rm: cannot remove `/home/justin/.gnome//gmc-MSIhgN': No such file or directory
esd: Esound sound daemon already running or stale UNIX socket
/tmp/.esd/socket
This socket already exists indicating esd is already running.
Exiting...
/dev/dsp: No such device
/dev/dsp: No such device
/dev/dsp: No such device
/dev/dsp: No such device
/bin/bash: xconfigurator: command not found
/dev/dsp: No such device
/dev/dsp: No such device

GnomeUI-WARNING **: Could not open help topics file NULL
/dev/dsp: No such device
/bin/bash: sndconfig: command not found
/dev/dsp: No such device
kill 773: No such process

waiting for X server to shut down

It does *basically* the same thing every time I log out, but most of the time it doesn't have the kill 773 at the end.

- When I shut down the computer it says this:

saving mixer settings modprobe: can't locate module sound-slot-0
modprobe: can't locate sound-service-0-0
aumix: error opening mixer

...and then everything else works fine and it shuts down.

Please try to keep it simple because I don't know Linux very well (my brain has gotten fryed from too much Windows)

Thanks in advance...

Before you read this, I suggest you read the Kernel Howtos.
 

It sounds like you need to recompile your kernel (gasp!). It's not as big a job as it might first appear, and so long as you KEEP A BACKUP of your existing kernel and of the new kernel options.

Boot into Windows. Determine as much as you possibly can about your hardware (unless you have the original manuals/documents lying handy :D ). For the sound card, you can do this by 'right-clicking' My Computer, going to Properties and then to system properties. Make a list of all the IRQs, DMAs and IO addresses for your soundcard. With some soundcards (like mine) you will see many entries. For example, I have 'Windows Sound System' and 'SB16', with different IRQs, etc, even though I've only got the one sound-card (CMI8330, onboard).

Reboot into Linux. Open a terminal window, go to '/usr/src/linux' and type 'make xconfig' (it might be './make xconfig'). Only change the soundcard part as the others are default, and should work anyway. Go to the 'save settings to file' bit, and save the setting to a file :D. I always save the settings to a Windows Partition aswell, so that should I completely wreck my Linux system, I've still got all the options, so I can sort out what went wrong.

Exit from the 'xconfig' program and then type 'make dep' followed by 'make clean' (I believe that 'make dep; make clean' on one line works, but I've never tried it). Once everything is done, type 'make bzImage' with a capital I in Image. And finally 'make bzlilo'. If this last step doesn't work, just run 'lilo'.

Now, what should happen is that your old kernel will be renamed '/oldkernel' or something, and your new one will be '/vmlinuz' (don't ask me about why it's spelt with a z here), and running lilo (or make bzlilo) remakes the lilo config file and points to both as OLD and LINUX respectively (I think).

As I only tried RedHat for about 4 weeks, I'm not sure what happend with the nice boot screen that you would normally get, but the standard Lilo screen is not that unforgiving.

Now, I'm saying that your sound-card will now work, but this works for almost all supported cards. I'm actually still having problems with my s/c because it's a bit of a crappy one. You may have to use something called ALSA (www.alsa-project.org).

Good luck.

Alsa (advanced linux sound i believe) works great. I had a problem with my sound when i installed suse, didn't configure right. Alsa fixed it right up :o)
Dallam

thanx...I'll try alsa first since it seems simpler.

Hi,
just make sure you read the alsa site first. I did rcalsasound before starting alsa config (alsa tries to shut down the sound module, sometimes it doesn't work). Alsa found and identified my card, set it all up and it was over and done with in a few minutes :o)
Dallam

Thanks for the help. I found out I didn't have sound support in the kernel from the install. Red Hat 6.1 comes with a program called sndconfig that detected my card and set it up. For some reason, I could not find sndconfig in the documentation, and the install didn't say anything about having to run it either.