SoundBlaster 16/AWE 32 Intall with Mandrake 8.0
 

Alright, first is full disclosure.....I am a great big newbie to Linux, but I am slowly getting the hang of it. Mandrake 8.0 did properly detect and uses all of my hardware, with the exception of my old sound card, a Sound Blaster 16/AWE 32 card from yesteryear. It instead seems to detect it as an "other hardware" device as such:

Vendor: Intel Corporation
Model: 82371AB PIIX4 APCI
Bus Type: PCI

My guess is that it is detecting the bus is in use, but cannot figure out why. Now, I just read in another thread to turn off PnP in the computer BIOS and see if that helps, but that has already been done. Mandrake's hardware system is called HardDrake and is a GUI based system with as far as I can tell absolutely no functionality,....it either finds and intalls your hardware, or it doesn't.

Does anybody out there share my problem, and/or does anyone know how I may overcome this little hitch? I'd really hate to go buy a new s/c just to get the full linux experience.

Thanks for any help.....Robert.

Perhaps it doesn't help, however...

I'm using a SB AWE32 with RedHat: using the isapnptools everything works fine (actually only RedHat 6.x need manual configuration: 7.0 works good in an automatic way).

Bye

Luigi

My system:

Redhat 8.0
Soundblaster 16/AWE ISA sound card
Alsa drivers

The Redhat installation detected my sound card and used the sb.o module and I had an entry in modules.conf of <alias sound-slot-0 sb>. I have since moved to the Alsa driver <http://www.alsa-project.org/>. This is what I did to get the alsa driver working.

You need:

alsa-driver-0.9.2
alsa-lib-0.9.2
alsa-utils-0.9.2

1) Untar all three packages. Then go into the alsa-driver-0.9.2 directory. Do:

a) ./configure --with-isapnp=yes
(do ./configure --help for more options. But the above is the vary least that you need to do).
(The README file doesn't say to do make, but if you have any trouble with make install you can try to do make before make install).
b) make install
c) .snddevices

2) Edit your /etc/modules.conf and add these lines:

# ALSA portion
alias char-major-116 snd
alias snd-card-0 snd-sb16
# OSS/Free portion
alias char-major-14 soundcore
alias sound-slot-0 snd-card-0
alias sound-service-0-0 snd-mixer-oss
alias sound-service-0-1 snd-seq-oss
alias sound-service-0-3 snd-pcm-oss
alias sound-service-0-8 snd-seq-oss
alias sound-service-0-12 snd-pcm-oss

3) Run 'modprobe snd-xxxx' where xxxx is the name of your card.

4) Do ./configure and make install in both the alsa-lib and alsa-utils directory that you untar(d).

Note: All mixer channels are muted by default. You must use a native or OSS mixer program to unmute appropriate channels.

5) Enjoy!

kudzu should recognize it right. do you have motherboard with soundcard on it? if so disable it in bios.