Hello you all

I've just installed Slackware 9.0 on an intel 850E system that uses the onboard ac'97 codec(AD 1885 or something like that.) It looks like Slackware has detected it and loaded modules for it but alas I'm not getting any sound. I've tried looking for any mixers on the system that might be muting the sound ; all I found was rexima- and all its sound levels were up. Here's some snippets of relevant output:

dmesg:

Intel 810 + AC97 Audio, version 0.21, 15:37:49 Mar 11 2003
PCI: Found IRQ 9 for device 00:1f.5
PCI: Sharing IRQ 9 with 00:1f.3
PCI: Setting latency timer of device 00:1f.5 to 64
i810: Intel ICH2 found at IO 0xef00 and 0xe800, IRQ 9
i810_audio: Audio Controller supports 6 channels.
ac97_codec: AC97 Audio codec, id: 0x4144:0x5360 (Analog Devices AD1885)

lsmod:

Module Size Used by Not tainted
i810_rng 2624 0 (unused)
uhci 24560 0 (unused)
i810_audio 21160 0
ac97_codec 9512 0 [i810_audio]
soundcore 3332 2 [i810_audio]
usb-ohci 18856 0 (unused)
ehci-hcd 14632 0 (unused)
usbcore 58144 1 [uhci usb-ohci ehci-hcd]
pcmcia_core 38112 0
ide-scsi 8048 0
eepro100 19316 1
mii 2240 0 [eepro100]
apm 9608 2


I checked lspci -v also and it looks like when and if I do get sound configured it'll be sharing IRQ 9 with some another device. I read a post earlier here where someone said this type of intel onboard sound setup worked with Slack 9 right out of the box so hopefully it's something minor I'm missing. Any ideas will be greatly appreciated.

Do you get any type of error when playing sound at all? Have you tried both as root and a regular user?

Try changing the permissions so everyone can use sound by doing this:

chmod 666 /dev/dsp* /dev/mixer*

Thanks for the reply tricky.
I did what you said and I also found a post over at linux journal that said to try
cat endofworld > /dev/dsp

I definately got some audio out of my speakers. I could hear the music a little but there was quite a bit of distortion.

I also did the same thing with a few .au files redirected to /dev/audio but the sound was ALL distortion.

The rexima mixer program doesn't seem to have any connection with these devices. I'm wondering if I need a better mixer or the drivers just suck.

Oh, there's also this from the dmesg output that for some reason didn't get in my first post:

ac97_codec: AC97 Audio codec, id: 0x4144:0x5360 (Analog Devices AD1885)
i810_audio: AC'97 codec 0 Unable to map surround DAC's (or DAC's not present), total channels = 2
i810_audio: setting clocking to 41349

Here's the linux journal link for anyone else following the thread:
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=2793
(not sure how to hyperlink it from quick reply)

I had the same problem in Mandrake. Try to find aumix and to increase volume
Hope this will help, sorry for English

Thanks X_shadow_X.

Unfortunately that doesn't seem to help either. I used aumix as suggested. It didn't matter what level I changed the volume to, the audio always came out. Even when I turned the volume to 0. The only way I can change the volume is to use the pc speaker knob. It seems like the mixers don't have any control over the /dev/mixer device.

At any rate, the sound that came out was distorted. Could it be the irq sharing causing problems?