Hey this is great news.

But can you just confirm that all your modules files are .gz compressed
to satisfy my curiousity (and that is a feature of Mandrake 9.1)?

Now that sound is working again, have you tried firing up alsamixer?

The very first thing to check is to make sure the channel for CENTER is not muted and to raise the volume level to see if you get any sound.

Incidentally what I would like to know is what is the source of the sound you are using, since I was not aware of any linux sound programs which will actually do 5.1 sound, but maybe you can remove my ignorance on that one?

Here's hoping I can learn something from you.

To answer your question as to which bit of the configuration is enabling a
driver file to support the specific sound card hardware, the most critical line is this one

alias snd-card-0 snd-cmipci

It says use the cmipci driver for the first sound card in your system.

And yes, Linux allows you to have more than one snd-card in your system.
In which you would need additional lines for each sound card.

alias snd-card-1 snd-{name of driver}
alias snd-card-2 snd-{name of driver}

etc

Also if you now do a

dmesg | less

and look for your sound card, you will see an informational message
about the kernel loading the cmipci driver for your card.

I have no idea, sorry.

file:/lib/modules/2.4.21-0.13mdk/kernel/sound/pci/snd-als4000.o.gz
file:/lib/modules/2.4.21-0.13mdk/kernel/sound/pci/snd-cmipci.o.gz
file:/lib/modules/2.4.21-0.13mdk/kernel/sound/pci/snd-cs4281.o.gz
file:/lib/modules/2.4.21-0.13mdk/kernel/sound/pci/snd-ens1370.o.gz
file:/lib/modules/2.4.21-0.13mdk/kernel/sound/pci/snd-ens1371.o.gz
file:/lib/modules/2.4.21-0.13mdk/kernel/sound/pci/snd-es1938.o.gz
file:/lib/modules/2.4.21-0.13mdk/kernel/sound/pci/snd-es1968.o.gz
file:/lib/modules/2.4.21-0.13mdk/kernel/sound/pci/snd-fm801.o.gz
file:/lib/modules/2.4.21-0.13mdk/kernel/sound/pci/snd-intel8x0.o.gz
file:/lib/modules/2.4.21-0.13mdk/kernel/sound/pci/snd-maestro3.o.gz
file:/lib/modules/2.4.21-0.13mdk/kernel/sound/pci/snd-rme32.o.gz
file:/lib/modules/2.4.21-0.13mdk/kernel/sound/pci/snd-rme96.o.gz
file:/lib/modules/2.4.21-0.13mdk/kernel/sound/pci/snd-sonicvibes.o.gz
file:/lib/modules/2.4.21-0.13mdk/kernel/sound/pci/snd-via82xx.o.gz

I don't know if I goofed this up while trying to install something or if Mandrake comes this way....

Is this what you meant?
[root@dhcppc2 root]# rpm -qf /lib/modules/2.4.21-0.13mdk/kernel/sound/pci/snd-cmipci.o.gz
kernel-2.4.21.0.13mdk-1-1mdk
[root@dhcppc2 root]#

I did this too.....

# depmod -a

to update the /lib/modules modules.dep file which is a list of dependencies for kernel modules.

I have both a alsa and a sound file in /etc/init.d

and when I was trying to open /etc/rcd/rc.sysinit by clicking on it to see what was in it my computer rebooted.... ??? Strange.

In /etc/init.d i found this...

# Load sound modules if and only if they need persistent DMA buffers
if LC_ALL=C grep -q "^[^#]*options sound dmabuf=1" /etc/modules.conf 2>/dev/null ; then
RETURN=0
alias=`/sbin/modprobe -c | awk '/^alias sound / { print $3 }'`
if [ -n "$alias" -a "$alias" != "off" ]; then
action "Loading sound module (%s): " $alias modprobe sound
RETURN=$?
fi
alias=`/sbin/modprobe -c | awk '/^alias sound-slot-0 / { print $3 }'`
if [ -n "$alias" -a "$alias" != "off" ]; then
action "Loading sound module (%s): " $alias modprobe sound-slot-0
RETURN=$?
fi
fi

if [ -f /proc/sys/kernel/modprobe ]; then
if [ -n "$USEMODULES" ]; then
sysctl -n -w kernel.modprobe="/sbin/modprobe" >/dev/null 2>&1
sysctl -n -w kernel.hotplug="/sbin/hotplug" >/dev/null 2>&1
else
# We used to set this to NULL, but that causes 'failed to exec' messages"
sysctl -n -w kernel.modprobe="/bin/true" >/dev/null 2>&1
sysctl -n -w kernel.hotplug="/bin/true" >/dev/null 2>&1
fi
fi

# Load modules (for backward compatibility with VARs)
if [ -x /etc/rc.d/rc.modules ]; then
/etc/rc.d/rc.modules
fi

This file was really big and I'm not sure what I was looking for but that's what I saw.

The others don't appear to have anything sound related in them from what I saw.

Thanks very much for taking the time to answer my questions.

Okay this shows that Mandrake keeps its module files in gzip compressed format. Obviously that means that the kernel is built with gzip uncompression capability. The advantage of doing this is that it reduces the storage space needed all the files, the downside is that whenever a module is loaded, it has to be uncompressed first, adding an overhead to the cpu processing. But since modules are not being frequently loaded and unloaded and re-loaded again, the effect will be minimal.

No not at all. You have shown that Mandrake uses this strategy of having
compressed module files.

Again this is good. It shows that the file belongs to the installed kernel package and that everything is in good order!

Well you will have to check the contents of the sound file in /etc/init.d
to see what each is actually doing, but since, as you have shown below,
loading of modules is done in rc.sysinit, it must be userspace configuration
(maybe restoring mixer settings).

Not really -- you double clicked on it, forcing it to be executed, which,
outside of the boot sequence, is not a good thing to do, since it probably
tried to do some important things which should only be done at boot time.
Have a look in the file to learn about how your partitions are checked,
your disks are mounted, and other basic boot time events occur in this file.

This is all good stuff. This was in rc.sysinit I presume. What it is doing is searching for the entries which you put in /etc/modules.conf and loading up the appropriate modules which you specified. It takes care of you having to worry about writing a separate script file to load up the sound modules.

Mandrake is based on RedHat, which has the policy of putting lots of stuff, including loading all the modules, be they for sound, usb etc, in a monolithic rc.sysinit file.

After all of this, you should be much more comfortable with the Linux boot process, the loading of kernel modules, and how to do configuration work :+)

I didn't see this post earlier.

I tried the alsamixer and it looks as though the only option is 4 channel sound. No Center channel at all, that I could see.

I wasn't aware that linux sound programs couldn't do 5.1 sound. That's a drag.

If the alsamixer is only showing 4 channels, then it means that
the DRIVER (the module) for your sound card currently only supports 4 channels.

Again the best way to check on developments is to look on

http://www.alsa-project.ORG

to see what features of your sound card are supported.

Also note that a new very hot and fresh alsa 0.9.6 has just been released
which may include additional support for your card.

If so, you would then need to download the source, compile the modules
AND probably the sound libraries as well (hopefully not breaking programs you have installed from the Mandrake distribution which use the previous library version).

On top of that, you also need a sound playing program which will actually
make use of the available channels.

So here are two questions which are still begging an answer -

1) what is your sound source, viz which file and type of file are you trying to play?

2) which program are you running to play this sound?

1) If I understand you correctly, I trying to play mp3s.

2) Being new to linux, I really don't which one to use. Ive been trying to use Xmms recently but the default seems to be Kaboodle so I used that at first.

That's another thing about linux, I still trying to figure out how to set defaults for programs applications

Mpeg2 Layer 3 compressed sound files come in mono, joint stereo,
and stereo formats - that is a maximum of 2 sound channels, left
and right. Thus there are no center or rear channels sources to play,
so you would not hear 5.1 sound. And since they are only stereo sound
files, xmms and all the other players are only created to process two
channels left and right.

So even if your sound card was fully supported for 5.1 channels, why would you expect to hear 5.1 sound from an MP3, or even sound from the center speaker, when there is only left and right channels available?

Where you will find 5.1 encoded sound files are the AOBs on a DVD.

And there is actually one application which can process all 6 channels
and pass the sound over to a device with 6 channels supported, and that is mplayer

-channels <number>
Change the number of playback channels, defaults to '2' if not
specified. If the number of output channels is bigger than the
number of input channels empty channels are inserted (unless
mixing from mono to stereo, then the mono channel is repeated in
both output channels). If the number of output channels is
smaller than the number of input channels, results depend on the
audio decoder (-afm). MPlayer asks the decoder to decode the
audio into as many channels as specified. Now it's up to the
decoder to fulfill the requirement. If the decoder outputs more
channels than requested, the exceeding channels are truncated.
This is usually only important when playing videos with AC3 au-
dio (like DVDs). In that case liba52 does the decoding by de-
fault and correctly downmixes the audio into the requested num-
ber of channels.

NOTE:
This option is honored by codecs (AC3 only) filters (surround)
and ao drivers (OSS at least).
Available options are:

2 Stereo
4 Surround
6 Full 5.1

Default? I have not heard of Kaboodle. The default on your system is in effect what has been made available and set by your distributor.

I think perhaps you are using the wrong terminology here. Defaults, in particular X11 application default resources, are settings which provide the default colors and fonts for X11 Xaw and motif programs. What you are probably meaning, is how does one change the application fired up when you hit a menu item on the desktop menu.

This is either done with a GUI menu editor program or through direct editing of the menu file.

Usually the GUI menu editor is invoked by holding down the right mouse button on the menu and selecting preferences/edit properties item.

A dialog box then appears with settings for icons, path to executable etc, name of menu item, and one then just changes the path to that of the desired executable (assuming of course it is installed on the system).

There was once a joke item comparing Operating Systems to airplanes. In the case of Unix/Linux the analogy was that there was a group of people on the runway with a load of parts, wings, wheels, etc and they were all arguing about which parts they should use and what colors to paint them.