my sound card is apperently not recognized although I followed the destructions from the alsa web site to the tee.

xine opens the files just fine, I can even get video; however no sound.
so I did the only logicle thing I could think of at the moment and installed the latest version of alsa. (drivers, utils, library 1.0.5)

the first problem I had was when installing. I came to the point of installing the module to the kernel (2.6.6 kanotix) with (#modprobe snd-es18xx) and I get
FATAL error inserting snd-es18xx (lib/modules/2.6.6-kanotix-3/alsa/isa/snd-es18xx.ko): no such device

I've also gotten the error messages
error while initializing device /dev/dsp/ no such device
and /proc/asound/cards reads --no sound device--

i do have some good news the modprobe command work with snd-mixer-oss and with snd-pcm1-oss if thats any concilation

I did the update-modules command and that seemed to run ok. but no luck.
any ideas where to start. perhaps its not starting with the boot? does the sound card need to be "turned on" or "registered" in any way? any files i should check?

Kanotix is also a Debian distrobution so if anyone knows the command to apt-get alsa or some other software that could work.

the card I'm working with is an ESS technologies audiodrive 1869 that came integrated (I hate integrated cards) on my little comaq 400mhz amd.

well i can tell you for certain that the ESS 1869 is definately supported using ALSA. go to the alsa project site and get the driver, configure it for the ESS card and compile and install it.

in almost all ways sound on linux sucks. they need to go back to the drawing board, and fast.

"in almost all ways sound on linux sucks. they need to go back to the drawing board, and fast."

Absolute nonsense and completely wrong.

RTFM and STFW...

netcrawl> lets not get all zealous, it can be frustrating sometimes.

linux, its not intuative in the same way as windows. there is no plug and play so to speak. yes you do have to rtfm but its part of the leaning process, once you have done it (so long as you write down any problems you had an how you resolved them) thats it.