Installing ALSA
 

Hi, I tried to install ALSA driver on my notebook. But I don't know where it is actually being loaded. How do I find out?

If it is not loaded, how do I get it loaded? Thanks.

Do you have a Linux distro running? If so, what flavor?

You can always try getting a command shell and typing:

locate ALSA...

How did you install ALSA? If you don't have a stock kernel you'll need to recompile using the ALSA source code.

What sound card is it? Try going to www.alsa-project.org and follow the Supported Soundcard link, find your sound card in the database and click the "Details" link. This will give you full instructions for how to install and set up ALSA for your particular sound card.

Hope this helps.

Thanks for the response. The thing is that ALSA project only gave instruction on how to compile from the source.

I am using Red Hat Linux 9. I found a compiled rpm package of the alsa driver at rpm.phone.net. I installed the package and tried to run another application that will start the audio driver.

I then use lsmod to see what audio module was loaded but saw that nothing about alsa was loaded. Am I supposed to see anything with the word alsa in the first place?

What I will like to know is that after installing the package, am I supposed to do anything else to get alsa started. Thanks so much.

Rebooting would be good :), or a modprobe or insmod, if you don't want to reboot. Installing the ALSA package is not going to insert the driver module for your sound card-- certainly not into a running kernel session; it will only make it available to be loaded when the kernel probes for a driver for the sound card the next time it is detected (which will happen when you next boot, unless you load the driver manually with modprobe or insmod).

The directions you read on the ALSA site should have mentioned the name of the specific module for your sound card, several times. So open a terminal, su to root, and try modprobe <module_name> and see what output you get.

I hope you also installed alsa-utils, because ALSA drivers are muted by default; you will need to run 'alsamixer' in a terminal to unmute them (and alsamixer is part of the alsa-utils package, as is alsactl, which will save and restore the mixer settings at boot).

Good luck.

Hi all, I am totally lost. In the beginning, I tried to compile the ALSA source and load the ALSA driver (with modprobe snd-intel8x0)but I faced the problem of a difference in the compiler version (Got an error saying that snd.o was compiled with compiler version 2 while kernel is compiled with version 3 ????).

I started a thread in newsgroup to ask for help and was advised to download rpm packages with compiled ALSA source and install those packages. After searching high and low, I found one at
http://rpm.pbone.net/index.php3/stat...i386.rpm.html,
downloaded it and install.

I tried to do modprobe snd-intel8x0 again but got messages like:
/lib/modules/2.4.20-8/kernel/sound/snd.o: unresolved symbol register_chrdev
/lib/modules/2.4.20-8/kernel/sound/snd.o: unresolved symbol create_proc_entry
/lib/modules/2.4.20-8/kernel/sound/snd.o: unresolved symbol vfs_readlink
.....
/lib/modules/2.4.20-8/kernel/sound/snd.o: unresolved symbol schedule_work
/lib/modules/2.4.20-8/kernel/sound/snd.o: insmod /lib/modules/2.4.20-8/kernel/sound/snd.o failed
/lib/modules/2.4.20-8/kernel/sound/snd.o: insmod snd-intel8x0 failed

What is going on? How can I actually get this working? I am totally new to Linux OS and I hope someone out there can help. Thanks.

Did you remove the modules you compiled before installing the RPM? I suspect that the errors you're getting are the original (miscompiled) module trying to load. Unresolved symbols in my experience usually indicate a compiler mismatch (the modules must be compiled with the same version of gcc as the kernel, and yours is apparently not).

Have you updated RH (and therefore gcc) since you installed, perhaps via up2date or yum? Please type "gcc --version" in a terminal to find out what version of gcc you are using. Unfortunately, I don't know what version of gcc the stock RH kernel was compiled with (most likely the original gcc version provided during install, before any possible updates were performed), but if you have updated gcc, then of course you would have the problem of mismatched compiler versions. To solve it, you could recompile the kernel with the new version of gcc, install and reboot to it, but that's probably further than you want to go right now. I would in any case suggest that you open a terminal, su to root, cd to the source directory where you compiled the ALSA modules and do a 'make uninstall' to remove the original module you compiled; since you know the path to it (from the error message), you can even check and make sure it has been removed once the process is completed.

Secondly, I see that the RPM you've downloaded "contains the ALSA kernel packages for kernel 2.4.20-8". Is that your currently running kernel, as shown by the output of uname -r in a terminal? If not, then this may well be your problem. Going back to the parent page of the link you gave, http://rpm.pbone.net/index.php3/stat...ronment_Kernel shows that there are several ALSA kernel packages available, and you may have chosen the wrong one. Scroll down the page, and you will see 4 alsa-kernel packages for RH9. One of them is for an athlon processor; the other three are for i386, i586, and i686 architectures respectively, but they are all compiled against kernel 2.4.20-24.1.caps.rh90.ccrma, which is hopefully the RH9 stock kernel (since it seems expected that you'd have some version of it).

Anyway, hope this explains a few things and is helpful to you.

Could you do a cat /proc/version and a gcc --version and report the outputs?

Hi, the output I got are as follows.

cat /proc/version
Linux version 2.4.20-8 (bhcompile@porky.devel.redhat.com) (gcc version 3.2.2 20030222 (Red Hat Linux 3.2.2-5)) #1 Thu Mar 13 17:54:28 EST 2003

gcc --version
gcc (GCC) 3.2.2 20030222 (Red Hat Linux 3.2.2-5)

Thanks.

Hi, I got it working already. Thanks for all the help.