I am having problems getting sound working in Mandrake 10.1, which is quite troubling as sound automatically worked when I installed 10.0 and every other previous version. I have a MSI KT3 Ultra-ARU (MS-6380E) motherboard with integrated Realtek AC97 Sound. I know that the hardware all works because it works in windows. I downloaded and installed the alsa drivers following all steps that they specified. I have searched through all the sound problem posts and read through the linux sound how-to to no avail. I have absolutely no sound at all in any application. I tried going through the harddrake troubleshooter for my sound module and here are the results I have gotten:

# lspcidrake -v | fgrep AUDIO
snd-via82xx : VIA Technologies|VT8233 [AC97 Audio Controller] [MULTIMEDIA_AUDIO] (vendor:1106 device:3059 subv:1462 subd:4720)

# grep sound-slot /etc/modules.conf
alias sound-slot-0 snd-card-0

# /sbin/lsmod
Module Size Used by
sg 33788 0
scsi_mod 104044 1 sg
md5 3584 1
ipv6 230916 10
autofs4 15268 0
snd-seq-oss 31232 0
snd-seq-midi-event 6080 1 snd-seq-oss
snd-seq 47440 4 snd-seq-oss,snd-seq-midi-event
snd-pcm-oss 49480 0
snd-mixer-oss 17376 1 snd-pcm-oss
snd-via82xx 22372 4
snd-ac97-codec 69392 1 snd-via82xx
snd-pcm 81800 4 snd-pcm-oss,snd-via82xx
snd-timer 20356 2 snd-seq,snd-pcm
snd-page-alloc 7400 2 snd-via82xx,snd-pcm
gameport 3328 1 snd-via82xx
snd-mpu401-uart 5856 1 snd-via82xx
snd-rawmidi 19300 1 snd-mpu401-uart
snd-seq-device 6344 3 snd-seq-oss,snd-seq,snd-rawmidi
snd 45988 18 snd-seq-oss,snd-seq,snd-pcm-oss,snd-mixer-oss,snd-via82xx,snd-ac97-codec,snd-pcm,snd-timer,snd-mpu401-uart,snd-rawmidi,snd-seq-device
soundcore 7008 1 snd
af_packet 16072 2
ip_vs 90656 0
floppy 55088 0
eth1394 17000 0
r8169 14180 0
ide-cd 37280 1
cdrom 37724 1 ide-cd
ohci1394 30788 0
ieee1394 292056 2 eth1394,ohci1394
loop 12520 0
nls_iso8859-1 3680 2
ntfs 147964 2
supermount 34804 3
via-agp 7360 1
agpgart 27752 1 via-agp
joydev 8032 0
tsdev 5824 0
evdev 7648 0
usbmouse 4256 0
usbhid 41088 0
uhci-hcd 28752 0
ehci-hcd 26244 0
ohci-hcd 18468 0
usbcore 103172 7 usbmouse,usbhid,uhci-hcd,ehci-hcd,ohci-hcd
genrtc 7444 0
ext3 120680 2
jbd 49080 1 ext3

# /sbin/chkconfig --list sound
sound 0 : off 1 : off 2 : on 3 : on 4 : on 5 : on 6 : off

# /sbin/chkconfig --list alsa
alsa 0 : off 1 : off 2 : on 3 : on 4 : on 5 : on 6 : off

# aumix -q
bash: aumix: command not found

# /sbin/fuser -v /dev/dsp
#


And here is the contents of my /etc/modules.conf

alias char-major-116 snd
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
alias snd-card-0 snd-card-intel8x0
alias net-pf-4 ipx
alias autofs autofs4

I would appreciate any help with this or a pointer in the right direction. Thanks.

(PS I enjoyed the automatic emoticons for my output from chkconfig that had to change in order to be able to post)

Open a terminal and enter "alsamixer", are the sliders turned up. Save settings with "alsactl store"

Thanks for the advice. I tried that and I get this:

alsamixer: function snd_ctl_open failed for default: No such device or address

Apparently, this is not the first time anyone has gotten this error message. So I searched for this error message and checked to ensure that I had the latest alsa drivers installed. To ensure that, I just downloaded alsa-driver-1.0.7 and installed it, following all steps from configuring to running snddevices. After this, I still get the same error. I checked to make sure the sound device and mixer both exist in /dev :

root@localhost dev]# ls -l | grep dsp
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 10 Dec 15 23:39 adsp -> /dev/adsp0
crw-rw---- 1 root audio 14, 12 Dec 15 23:39 adsp0
crw-rw---- 1 root audio 14, 28 Dec 15 23:39 adsp1
crw-rw---- 1 root audio 14, 44 Dec 15 23:39 adsp2
crw-rw---- 1 root audio 14, 60 Dec 15 23:39 adsp3
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 9 Dec 15 23:39 dsp -> /dev/dsp0
crw-rw---- 1 root audio 14, 3 Dec 15 23:39 dsp0
crw-rw---- 1 root audio 14, 19 Dec 15 23:39 dsp1
crw-rw---- 1 root audio 14, 35 Dec 15 23:39 dsp2
crw-rw---- 1 root audio 14, 51 Dec 15 23:39 dsp3

[root@localhost dev]# ls -l | grep mixer
crw-rw---- 1 root audio 14, 11 Dec 15 23:39 amixer0
crw-rw---- 1 root audio 14, 27 Dec 15 23:39 amixer1
crw-rw---- 1 root audio 14, 43 Dec 15 23:39 amixer2
crw-rw---- 1 root audio 14, 59 Dec 15 23:39 amixer3
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 11 Dec 15 23:39 mixer -> /dev/mixer0
crw-rw---- 1 root audio 14, 0 Dec 15 23:39 mixer0
crw-rw---- 1 root audio 14, 16 Dec 15 23:39 mixer1
crw-rw---- 1 root audio 14, 32 Dec 15 23:39 mixer2
crw-rw---- 1 root audio 14, 48 Dec 15 23:39 mixer3

And this was the extent of the suggestions I found for this error message, so again I'm stuck.

Well, I have finally gotten sound working. I took the easy route of doing a complete re-install, choosing the right options, and it worked. I was happy to find out that because of the way Linux partitions things, my home directory was preserved, but I had backed it up anyway, just in case. Sorry I have no helpful suggestions for anyone with a similar problem.