I recently installed Mandrake 9.1 kernel 2.4. Everything works fine except there's no sound. running Mandrake on ASUS A7V8X-X chipset KT 400(Appolo I guess) and sounth bridge VT8235. When click on an mp3 Xmms opens up and it seems its playing it in terms of the equalizer bars and everything but still there is no sound.
After googlin a bit I checked aumix. It was set to "Mute All" and all volumes at 0 at first but changing that wouldn't bring out any sound . Using that cat command I found that the default driver seems to be for KT8233. Would that be the reason? I had SuSE 9.0 on my box a couple of months ago (kernel 2.6) and I had sound there BUT now Konqueror was so slow and sluggish. Then I tried RedHat. No sound with rh either. Then Knoppix. Same problem. Does anyone have a clue as to how to fix this problem? Mandrake looks like a very fine and smooth distro so I would really like to be able to use it and move completely from XP.
I'm a noob so please be patient with me cuz we all have been noobs someday. lol (no offense)

Any help will be greatly appreciated.

Could you post the output of lspci and lsmod?

My board is that one and I got sound working when I searched LQ and found this thread
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...5&pagenumber=2
and post #17 has a easy tutorial.

Here are the outputs
lspci:
00:00.0 Host bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT8377 [KT400 AGP] Host Bridge
00:01.0 PCI bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT8235 PCI Bridge
00:0b.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation NV5M64 [RIVA TNT2 Model 64/Model 64 Pro] (rev 15)
00:10.0 USB Controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. USB (rev 80)
00:10.1 USB Controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. USB (rev 80)
00:10.2 USB Controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. USB (rev 80)
00:10.3 USB Controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. USB 2.0 (rev 82)
00:11.0 ISA bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT8235 ISA Bridge
00:11.1 IDE interface: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82C586/B/686A/B PIPC Bus Master
IDE (rev 06)
00:11.5 Multimedia audio controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT8233 AC97 Audio Controller (rev 50)
00:12.0 Ethernet controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT6102 [Rhine-II] (rev 74)

lsmod:
for some strange reason I get command not found!

Try /sbin/lsmod

Also, are you using OSS or ALSA sound drivers? I'm guessing OSS but I want to be sure.

Could you also do a find /lib/modules -iname via82c*_audio.o and report the output?

Thanks ADZ for your followup. Really appreciate it.

I post the results of lspci and lsmod again

lspci:

00:00.0 Host bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT8377 [KT400 AGP] Host Bridge
00:01.0 PCI bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT8235 PCI Bridge
00:0b.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation NV5M64 [RIVA TNT2 Model 64/Model 64 Pro] (rev 15)
00:10.0 USB Controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. USB (rev 80)
00:10.1 USB Controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. USB (rev 80)
00:10.2 USB Controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. USB (rev 80)
00:10.3 USB Controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. USB 2.0 (rev 82)
00:11.0 ISA bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT8235 ISA Bridge
00:11.1 IDE interface: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82C586/B/686A/B PIPC Bus Master IDE (rev 06)
00:11.5 Multimedia audio controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT8233 AC97 Audio Controller (rev 50)
00:12.0 Ethernet controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT6102 [Rhine-II] (rev 74)


/sbin/lsmod:

Module Size Used by Not tainted
udf 90464 0 (autoclean)
via82cxxx_audio 22172 0
uart401 8196 0 [via82cxxx_audio]
ac97_codec 12488 0 [via82cxxx_audio]
sound 70644 0 [via82cxxx_audio uart401]
soundcore 6276 0 [via82cxxx_audio sound]
af_packet 14952 1 (autoclean)
sr_mod 16920 0 (autoclean)
via-rhine 15056 1 (autoclean)
mii 3832 0 (autoclean) [via-rhine]
supermount 15296 2 (autoclean)
ide-cd 33856 0
cdrom 31648 0 [sr_mod ide-cd]
ide-scsi 11280 0
scsi_mod 103284 2 [sr_mod ide-scsi]
ehci-hcd 18568 0 (unused)
usb-uhci 24652 0 (unused)
usbcore 72992 1 [ehci-hcd usb-uhci]
rtc 8060 0 (autoclean)
ext3 59916 2
jbd 38972 2 [ext3]


So I guess these are the modules loaded to the Kernel?

Also after issuing "find /lib/modules -iname via82c*_audio.o" I get nothing meaning it does not exist I guess. Also "alsa soundcore" yields "command not found". So What do I do from here?
Thank you very much

Well this is your sound module (driver): via82cxxx_audio - It is OSS.

It's loaded (yes lsmod lists modules currently loaded in kernel) and should therefore be operational. Double check your volume settings and make sure that ALL are unmuted and set to 100%. You can reduce this later as sound might come out distorted but for now put all to 100%. Then, in XMMS, go to Options -> Preferences -> Audio I/O plugins and check what output plugin you are currently using (and tell me). Also, are you using KDE or GNOME?

I am using KDE (I like GNOME too). Now in Xmms the output plugin is:

OSS Driver 1.2.7 [libOSS.so]

There is a "configure" botton there when I click it I see:
Audio device:
Default (Unknown)
Mixer Device
Default (Unknown)

Is this useful?

Thanks

OK the reason I ask if you're using KDE or GNOME is because both have their own sound server. For more info on sound servers check out this thread. So what you want to do is use the output plugin associated with that server. KDE's sound server is called aRTs so change the OSS output plugin in XMMS to read arts output plugin. That should solve your problem.

Thank you adz. Although that didn't solve my problem. I set the output plugin of xmms to KDE's sound server but still I have no sound. I don't know if Mandrake has sound when you click on stuff like windows or not, but if it DOES, I cant hear any. I'll probably buy a PCI card thats fully suppoted and install it on my box and see what happens. But anyways, thank you very much for you help. I learned alot of stuff and I appreciate your help.

It does not, for the most part, unless you go into the KDE Control Center and set some... although you should hear a little theme when KDE loads.

As long as you remembered to unmute and raise ALL volume levels (not just master and PCM)...

Hi,

I had the same problem with my ASUS board but not the Giga-Byte 7VAXP (SuSE 9.0,9.1) board with the same chipset, go figure. At any rate I found some directions on SuSEs site to run alsoconf and it worked great.

run alsaconf as root...fixed my sound via-82xx. very easy to do.

I hope this works for you, as it did for me. I think this might be the first time I actually helped.

Good luck,
Bruce

I hope you didn't go out and spend money on a PCI card. I have that board in my wife's comp, and sound works great. But it's with the ALSA drivers. If you go to that thread that Ming Dao referenced earlier, and follow those simple little instructions, it should work. If not, the problem is more than likely with Mandreck. If you want to get that onboard sound chip working, don't give up. Get the ALSA drivers and forget that OSS stuff. Adz and Holly know their stuff, and they haven't given up on you. What say?

The VIA8233 onboard sound is fully supported; if you look at my sig, you'll see that I have one as well. While I will freely admit that it was blasted dodgy when I first started using Linux (as the OSS drivers in the earlier 2.4 series kernel were broken, not having the needed AC 97 patch), ALSA always worked, as did Mandrake (from version 9.0 onward), as Mandrake always installed ALSA by default. Nowadays, current kernels even have the AC 97 patch for the OSS drivers, so there's no reason that the card should not work.... and in fact the card does work.

It is detected, and the modules are loaded.

That means this is a mixer problem, not a hardware/driver problem.

The first thing I see is that you unmuted aumix (the OSS mixer) rather than alsamixer (the ALSA mixer). Running alsaconf as suggested should not normally be necessary, but might be useful. Basically, if the problem is that your sound apps don't crash but you can't hear any sound, either the mixer is not set/unmuted, and/or your sound apps are misconfigured (using the wrong output plugins). When one gets errors such as "sound server could not start" and XMMS crashes to desktop when trying to play something, then you have a problem with the soundcard hardware being misdetected or misconfigured.

So Chinaman is quite right; it's an unneccessary expenditure of cash to get another sound card. But it's your money, so do as you will .