First of all, I know for a fact both input and output work for my card. I've tested the latest Mepis, where I had sound and could use a mike.

WIth mandrake (and this mandriva), I've always had sound (thought I had to change the volume within the first app that made use of it after reboot), but I've never been able to have a mike work. My card is an onboard intel i810 ac'97 (in a toshiba notebook).

A couple of days ago, I tried many things to have a mike work, but was unsuccessful. Worse, now, I have no more sound on top of that.

For the life of me I can't figure out what went wrong. None of the advices given in the control center is any help. A few things of note, though :

- sound and alsa service start-up at run-level 2 to 5. They are stopped on 0, 1 and 6. I've no idea if this behavior is normal or not.

- although the modules are loaded, they do not appear in modules.conf (where ther is nothing at the moment):
lsmod gives :
snd-seq-dummy 2596 0
snd-seq-oss 31584 0
snd-seq-midi-event 6208 1 snd-seq-oss
snd-seq 47472 5 snd-seq-dummy,snd-seq-oss,snd-seq-midi-event
snd-seq-device 6796 3 snd-seq-dummy,snd-seq-oss,snd-seq
snd-pcm-oss 49056 0
snd-mixer-oss 17248 1 snd-pcm-oss
snd-intel8x0 29216 0
snd-ac97-codec 75256 1 snd-intel8x0
snd-pcm 80776 3 snd-pcm-oss,snd-intel8x0,snd-ac97-codec
snd-timer 20324 2 snd-seq,snd-pcm
snd-page-alloc 7588 2 snd-intel8x0,snd-pcm
snd 46980 9 snd-seq-oss,snd-seq,snd-seq-device,snd-pcm-oss,snd-mixer-oss,snd-intel8x0,snd-ac97-codec,snd-pcm,snd-timer
soundcore 7104 1 snd

- from fuser, there is apparently no program hogging the card, but both /dev/dsp and /dev/sound have rw permission for root and his group only. Again, I don't know if it's standard, but in any case, adding rw for everybody else didn't change a thing.

- I think I pretty much ran alsaconf in any way I could, but it doesn't change anything, though when the service starts, I can hear something happening (the faint initial "snap - for lack of a better word - that indicates the card is activated).


If anybody has any idea of what I should look for, activate or shut down in order to get my sound back, I'd be grateful.