Strange things a foot with AC97 sound card
 

Hi I am running SUSE 9.2 with a Intel AC97 sound card.

When I boot, there is no sound.
If I go to control panel / Yast Modules / Hardware / Sound and reset the values under the options button. Sound starts working.

BUT, when I log out or reboot, it disapears!

I am slowly learning about Linux and am loving the fact that there is so much to play with.

Any help would be greatfully recieved.

Cheers!

are you using kde or gnome? their mixers ( I think both have this IIRC, but I use aumix for this) have options to restore the mixer values at login.

Hi I am using KDE at the mo!

Were would I find the option to restore mixers at login?

check in kmix( the kde sound mixer, should be under the multimedia section in your menu's) or kcontrol ( the kde control center, should have a button on your panel or under somewhere like "system" or something in your menu's) under the sound section.

Hi Have just tried that! The Kmix has selected restore volumes at log in but my sound still disappears after i log out.

What about changing the driver?

I don't know if this will help, but perhaps you could run alsaconf as root. It may perform the neccessary changes.

Also, the alsasound service loads in the default using alsactl. The settings come from /etc/asound.state.
What is the output of: sed -n /control.[12] /,/}/p' /etc/asound.state

Hi jschiwal

I ran alsaconf, which ran well. It detected two cards (I only have one!)
intel8x0 Intel Corp. 82801EB/ER AC'97
legacy Probe legacy ISA (Non-PnP) Chip
I told it to configure the intel8x0 card.

It enabled sound but when I restarted the sound was disabled again.

I am new to Linux so could you explain what I do regarding your next statement.
(What is the output of: sed -n /control.[12] /,/}/p' /etc/asound.state)

Could grub have anything to do with it, as I have had a number of issues with it. My loader is as follows: -
(hd1,7)/boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/hdb8 vga=0x31a selinix=0 splash=silent resume=/dev/hdb7 desktop elevator=as showopts
(hd1,7)/boot/initrd

I don't think this has anything to do with your problem, but I had to disable ALISA to get reliable sound working under KDE. (ALISA grabs exclusice control of the sound card.)

Have you tried the Gnome desktop? It seemed much better with sound applications. (On the other hand, I do use KDE most of the time since I find the desktop easier to use and configure.)

Ok Sorted

I was told to removed all this from grub on another forum: -
resume=/dev/hdb7 desktop elevator=as showopts

Hardware then found my web cam which was missing.(which has a built in mic).
So I unplugged the web cam and restarted, and well there you go, all is fine again.
Must have been a conflict between my web cam and my sound card.

Thanks for all you help and sugguestions.
If anyone can see if there is another reason why it worked, that would be cool. I'm just glad things seam to be moving!

Glad you got things working.

Alsa reloads the sound settings when you boot up. It's possible that they are set too low to hear.
The sed command, entered in the console, prints out a section of the file that contains the initial settings.

Here is the same command on my desktop:
I used the sed command to display just the part of the file that I wanted to look at. This file is very long with around 26 sections. Only the first two were of interest.