No sound w/SB Live and Mandrake 10.1
 

Hello. I'm just starting out on Mandrake 10.1 and I've run into a problem with my sound. Installed in my machine is a Soundblaster Live! 24-bit card. If I try to load music into Amarok, I get the message

Sound server informational message
Error while initializing sound driver:
device /dev/dsp can't be opened (no such file or directory)
The sound server will continue, using the null output device.

And sure enough, there is no directory /dev/dsp.

If I go to the "services" part of the Mandrakelinux Control Center. one of the services it offers to launch on boot is alsa, but next to the word alsa it says "stopped" and pressing start doesn't change that.

When I run lspci, I see:
...
00:1e.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corp. 82801 PCI Bridge (rev 81)
00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corp. 82801DB/DBL (ICH4/ICH4-L) LPC Bridge (rev 01)
00:1f.1 IDE interface: Intel Corp. 82801DB/DBL (ICH4/ICH4-L) UltraATA-100 IDE Controller (rev 01)
00:1f.3 SMBus: Intel Corp. 82801DB/DBL/DBM (ICH4/ICH4-L/ICH4-M) SMBus Controller (rev 01)
01:04.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation: Unknown device 0326 (rev a1)
01:05.0 Communication controller: Conexant: Unknown device 2f20
01:06.0 Multimedia audio controller: Creative Labs [SB Live! Value] EMU10k1X
01:06.1 Input device controller: Creative Labs [SB Live! Value] Input device controller
01:09.0 Ethernet controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4401 100Base-T (rev 01)

alsaconf does not detect my sound card, and sndconfig only finds "Model: Unknown vendor|unknown ? device 1102:0006"

Any suggestions are appreciated.

Go to www.alsa-project.org. Click on 'SoundCard' links, select your manufacturer (Creative), and then find your card. When you find your card, you'll see a link to details on how to set things up. The downloads are available at alsa-project's home page, and the alsa-users mailing list (accessible at the home page, too) is quite useful.

I hope this helps. It will certainly point you in the right direction. I have a SB Live 24-bit card built into my motherboard, and it took a while of tweeking to get it to work.

Steve

PS - forgot to mention - you'll definitely need to upgrade alsa (via the directions) to get this card to work; it's newer, and needs the new drivers that aren't shipped yet.

I have visited this page, but I get hung up on the step where I enter "chmod a+rw /dev/dsp /dev/mixer /dev/sequencer /dev/midi", which returns something similar to "chmod: cannot access `/dev/dsp': No such file or directory" for each directory. I feel like maybe at some point in this process something should be creating these directories, but they still don't exist. Thanks in advance for any further help.

I've run into that, too. In fact, the only time I got the sound card to work was after I upgraded to the latest kernel (2.6.11-1.27), and THEN went through those steps. But, I'm also running FC3, and I think there's a difference in how the device files are handled. Try the kernel upgrade, if you haven't already.

Steve

I'm having problems with this too, only I'm stuck on the: line. I keep getting:What's going wrong?

I think I see now what's wrong, when doing ./configure, it says I need to install the full kernel source, how do I go about that?