Re: sound on G3 Powerbook

[Matt Brubeck <mbrubeck@hmc.edu>]

On Tue, 30 May 2000, Joshua Holland wrote:

> I have no sound on my powerbook.  I am running Gnome with 
> Enlightenment.  I have set sound in the Gnome control panel.  When I 
> enable audio in the Enlightenment settings, I get a message saying there 
> was an error communicating with the Audio server.

Gnome and Enlightenment audio require esd, (the Enlightened Sound
Daemon). Make sure that you have the esd package installed and that esd is
running.

If sound in general doesn't work (try xmms, for example), then

* If you built your kernel yourself, make sure that PowerMac DMA
  audio was enabled. If dmasound was built as a module, make sure the
  module is loaded. (If you're using a stock kernel you probably
  don't have to worry about this.)

* Check that the volume is not set to zero. Use the "aumix" utility.
  Note that the different outputs (speaker, line out, headphone...)
  may not be labelled correctly for Mac hardware.

* If any of these programs complain about not being able to find the
  audio devices in /dev, make sure that the devices such as /dev/audio are
  present (if not, go to /dev as root and type "./MAKEDEV audio"). See 
  that you have permission to read and write to the devices -- the best
  way to do this is probably to add yourself to group audio.