Greetings.

I had Mandriva setup on my PC previously, no problem. However, the on-board audio has died. No sound comes out of the speakers in Mandriva or Windows.

I put in an older sound card I had lying around and disabled the on-board audio in the BIOS. WIndows detects the card - Soundblaster PCI512 and works no problem and everything works fine.

Did a new fresh install of Mandriva, and during the setup it detects the card as a Soundblaster Live. After the install, if you press Esc during the bootup sequence to see details, it says that the sound card is not found (can't be much more specific, it's on the screen for like a second before it goes away).

Went into HardDrake, and before I can even select anything, it tells me that it needs to install a new driver (emu10k1). I allow it to install. Checking the settings in HardDrake, it is using driver snd-emu10k1. I switch it to the newly installed driver, and restart the computer. During the boot sequence, it no longer gives the error regarding the soundcard not being detected.

However, I still have no sound. If I try and play an MP3, for example, I am told that /dev/dsp does not exist and that audio output is being directed to null. On a hunch, I reinstalled again, and this time during the setup I selected the emu10k1 driver, thinking that the setup process may fix the /dev/dsp issue. No luck.

I searched these forums, and found a series of commands someone used to fix such an error and gave it a try -- honestly not knowing what the first two commands did, but figured I can't hurt anything at this point. No luck there either. Below is what I tried:

Ideas ?

To read those messages that flash by during the system boot you should be able to read them:
So, ostensibly you have successfully installed the sound card so that Mandriva now recognises and configures it.

This may be as simple as entering

into a console and unmuting the sound. It is muted by default.
See if that fixes it before playing around too much with the settings and permissions. You have opened your audio to one and all (change to 700 for yourself only unless you have good reason to do otherwise), I don't think that you needed to do and
again unless you had good reason to do so, and although creating a symbolic link between /dev/dsp0 and /dev/dsp probably won't hurt anything, it is imho superfluous.

Keep us posted on developments


edit: typo

found this through a quick google search (mknod /dev/dsp).
That has sorted my problem out, thank you , hope your problem is sorted...

all my dsp / oss devices are listed @ /dev/oss/oss_hdaudio0/
here i find : how do i create /dev/dsp or what device do i need to link /dev/dsp to!