Hey,

I looked through the guide mentioned at the top of the forums and I did not find information about sound card. Does anyone know where I might find a list of supported sound hardware.

I just picked up a Dell 450mhz/256mb of ram. With ubuntu I get much better performance as compared to my 2600....

At anyrate, I would like to install sound drivers but to be quite honest I haven't a clue which drivers I have.

Where should I start?

Thanks,

David

check the hcl

here

or as root try alsaconf (i think) and see what if gives you.

is your sound on board the motherboard, or do you have a card ?

also lsmod will let you know what kernel modules are loaded already. Ubuntu may have already found it for you.


let us know

Hey,

lsmod shows that there is no sound driver. But there are two other modules that are failing because they are trying to access non-existant hardware( a fan and something else...).

I could not find anything called alsaconf, I found alsamixer(volume control) and alsoctl which doesn't seem to do me anything.

I can't seem to find the application to setup this device.

Now I actually have a second problem, I do not know what the card is. I am currently working on the machine via SSH from work. But the card is on board in a Dell Machine. It's an optiplex 450mhz.

The thing that feels funny about this is that dell never uses quality parts in it's machines, so for there to be a creative feels kind of weird...

David


Dell says I need:

Release Title: Audio: Creative Labs Sound Blaster Live! 512V, Driver, Linux, English, Dimension XPS Txxx, OptiPlex GX1, Precision 420, v. 1.0, A01
Release Date: 02/09/2000
Description: Red Hat Linux 6.1 Sound Blaster Live Driver

make sure thats what you have and if the kernel sees it on boot.

do
lspci
or maybe even
lspci -l
and see if anything shows up about it.


if you dont have alsaconf, you probably dont have alsa, which is very strange i think for ubuntu. but i am not sure.

do an
sudo apt-get install alsa-base alsa-utils
to see if you already have alsa installed.

root@dell:~# apt-get install alsa-base alsa-utils
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree... Done
alsa-base is already the newest version.
alsa-utils is already the newest version.
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 31 not upgraded.
root@dell:~#


Now when I ran lspci this is what I got:
0000:00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corp. 440BX/ZX/DX - 82443BX/ZX/DX Host bridge (rev 03)
0000:00:01.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corp. 440BX/ZX/DX - 82443BX/ZX/DX AGP bridge (rev 03)
0000:00:07.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corp. 82371AB/EB/MB PIIX4 ISA (rev 02)
0000:00:07.1 IDE interface: Intel Corp. 82371AB/EB/MB PIIX4 IDE (rev 01)
0000:00:07.2 USB Controller: Intel Corp. 82371AB/EB/MB PIIX4 USB (rev 01)
0000:00:07.3 Bridge: Intel Corp. 82371AB/EB/MB PIIX4 ACPI (rev 02)
0000:00:0f.0 PCI bridge: Digital Equipment Corporation DECchip 21152 (rev 03)
0000:00:11.0 Ethernet controller: 3Com Corporation 3c905B 100BaseTX [Cyclone] (rev 24)
0000:01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc 3D Rage Pro AGP 1X/2X (rev 5c)


None of those look like sound card. Now the card is enabled in BIOS, which means that perhaps the sound card is kaput?

It is an onboard card.

Thanks,

David

if its an on board card (on the mobo itself) lspci may not find it. not sure.
did you try alsaconf as root ?

Is there another app like lspci that might display the hardware( lspci is really cool, thanks for that).

I cannot find alsa-conf. I tried it as root. I also did the following:

root@dell:~# ls
config dbootstrap_settings Desktop sblive_2-3_i386.deb SBLive.rpm
root@dell:~# find / | grep alsaconf
root@dell:~#

(ie can't find the program)


Now what I thought of trying was getting the driver from Dell. I found SBLive.rpm and used alien to convert it to a deb file. But I cannot get it installed.

I tried apt-get install sblive_2-3_i386.deb but it seems that that only checks repositories and not the working directory.


David

to install a .deb package that you downloaded (or prepared yourself) cd into the directory and as root use dpkg -i

like this
dpkg -i yourpackage.deb

or you could supply the path
dpkg -i /path/to/yourpackage.deb

i havn't used it myself, but i hear hwd is a good hardware checkout tool that will pretty much cover everything.

another thing you might try is burning a copy of the latest knoppix and seeing what it tells you about sound. knoppix is a live cd that runs from your cdrom. lots of folks use it to do troubleshooting because it has really sweet autoconfiguring tools. But i still think what ubuntu has is as good if not better.

i just installed xubuntu on my wifes desktop ( its ubuntu with xfce4 instead of gnome ) really good for older hardware.

hope this helps

um..this is one i've heard before. yes, dells use creative cards - but they are custom chipsets made for them, and don't work with the normal sb drivers. I wasn't sure if there were drivers made for them for linux, but it looks like there is.

I knew it. Someway somehow Dell has screwed me again.

So I now have a .deb package on my hd and I can't figure out how to install it.

apt-get install filename.deb
doesn't take local packages...

David

Alright, I did this instead:
root@dell:~# alien -dic SBLive.rpm
2498 blocks
/bin/sed: can't read /etc/conf.modules: No such file or directory


I added -dic to install the package but it looks like it is distro specific because it can't find the conf.modules file.

But if created it and added the line:
alias sound emu10k1

I found the file: /etc/modprobe.d/aliases

which seems to contain a lot of entries that are similar.

I will add the line in myself. I will let you know what happens.


David

Alright, I don't think it installed but I still don't have the alsaconf program to setup my card. Is there another application in ubuntu that will let me do it?

Thanks,

David

Ok, I need the emu10k1 driver for the card.

How do I install this? The only sound tool in Ubuntu GNome I can find is for setting up dings when you click stuff.

HELP!!!!

PLEASE!

Thanks,

David

if you figure this out pls let me know! I have an identical problem on an identical machine!


thanks,

matt

Hey,

I never did figure this one out. In the end what I did was I installed another sound card I had (sound blaster something) and that one worked fine. It was a PCI card and was detected/installed with no warnings or messages.

Sorry I can't help you,

David