no sound (what else is new?)

Forum: Multimedia
Topic: no sound (what else is new?)
started by: cindy

Posted by cindy on Nov. 04 2005,05:12

I'm a refugee from Feather Linux. Installed it on my HD, had sound, then had big problems installing a favorite app (Amarok). I wasted a whole week of evenings learning my way around fluxbox and the Feather way of doing things. So here I am with DSL on my HD. Looks good but no sound! I have an old HP with 512 mb of memory with a rather new creative labs sb audigy (rev4) sound card.

I went through the install of alsa and have tried lots of different configurations of xmms - and I've spent an evening looking through these forums for a solution - to no avail. Frankly I'm ready to give up and go with Ubuntu or some other "easy" but bloated distro.

Can anyone out there help?

I'm not a Linux genius by the way.

Posted by doobit on Nov. 05 2005,13:16

You might try the DSL 2.0RC1 just for kicks. It has a newer kernel that might contain the drivers for your card. However, you also might have an IRQ conflict.
I would not ever characterize learning something as time wasted, by-the-way.
Open a terminal and at the command prompt type lsmod to see if the SB driver is in the list. Then you may need to modprobe the driver.

Posted by cindy on Nov. 07 2005,19:21

Thanks doobit for the suggestion. Last night I installed DSL 2.0RC1. It didn't detect the sound card.

Another distribution - the live CD version of PCLinuxOS - on the same machine detected the sound card and produced sound. Do you thnk that would rule out the possibility of there being a IRQ conflict?

Posted by doobit on Nov. 07 2005,19:36

Not necessarily. It depends on what the OS assigns to where when it boots up.
You didn't say what you have tried so far, but another option is to load up the alsa drivers that are available using the myDSL control panel. You have to follow the info pages carefully. Here is a link to a discussion on that: < http://damnsmalllinux.org/cgi-bin....hl=alsa >
And there are other discussions on alsa drivers as well. Look at all of them. Your solution is out there.

Posted by cbagger01 on Nov. 10 2005,06:00

Try booting your PCLinuxOS and then open a terminal window and type:

lsmod

and write down the names of the modules that are loaded.

Or better yet, type:

lspci -v

to learn about your pci devices.

Then report this information and maybe it is possible to manually load the same modules while using DSL instead of PCLinuxOS

Posted by tempestuous on Nov. 16 2005,12:30

SBLive! and SB Audigy contain similar chipsets (emu10k1/emu10k2) but it appears that the original OSS SBLive! driver was written prior to the Audigy's release.
There is a now a newer version of the driver which supports Audigy, but I think this has never made its way into the standard kernel.

So, option 1 -
You can compile this newer version yourself, from < http://sourceforge.net/projects/emu10k1 >
I suggest you make sure the new version overwrites the existing version, otherwise you will end up with two modules with identical filenames - emu10k1.o
There's a revised ac97_codec module in this driver package, too.

Option 2 -
Install ALSA. ALSA for DSL2.0 is discussed here - < http://damnsmalllinux.org/cgi-bin....41;st=0 >
You need to boot with -
dsl alsa=emu10k1
Or with a hard drive install this is achieved by modifying /etc/lilo.conf -
append="alsa=emu10k1 ..."
Then run "lilo". You may also have to run alsaconf once booted, I'm not sure.

Posted by SaidinUnleashed on Nov. 16 2005,18:19

Not an extension issue.

Moved to the proper forum.

-J.P.