The sound of silence
The card in question is an Aureal Vortex 3D. After some fruitless
kernel-wrestling I discovered the only Linux support is with OSS. So I
got an eval license of that and compiled it for my system (kernel 2.2.13
SMP) However when I execute soundon and try and play something, there are
no errors but I don't hear anything either! My speakers are plugged in
correctly i'm pretty sure of that.
cat /dev/sndstat reports this:
OSS/Linux 3.9.2y (C) 4Front Technologies 1996-1999
License serial number: E00000008
This Open Sound System copy is licensed for limited evaluation use only.
You can order a permanent OSS license from
http://www.opensound.com/order.html License will expire after: 06/2000
Options: ALL
*** Activity time of this evaluation version is limited ***
Build: 2.2.13-SMP
Card config: Aureal Vortex at 0xe9000000 irq 10
Software mixing (audio)
Audio devices:
0: Aureal Vortex 2 (AU8830) (DUPLEX)
1: SoftOSS v1.2 CH #0
2: SoftOSS v1.2 CH #1
3: SoftOSS v1.2 CH #2
4: SoftOSS v1.2 CH #3
5: SoftOSS v1.2 CH #4
6: SoftOSS v1.2 CH #5
7: SoftOSS v1.2 CH #6
8: SoftOSS v1.2 CH #7
Synth devices: 0: SoftOSS v1.2
Midi devices: 0: Aureal Vortex 2
Timers: 0: System clock 1: SoftOSS
Mixers: 0: Aureal Vortex 2 (STAC9708)
1: SoftOSS
The permissions on all the devices look ok to me. What went wrong?
I thought this might be because I am not a member of group audio (which
owns the audio devices) which led to another problem. With PAM, login
supposedly uses /etc/security/groups.conf to add groups on login. I added
the following line:
*; tty* ;*;!Al0000-2400;floppy,audio,lp
but this doesn't seem to do anything. Why? and what's the correct way of
adding console users to groups?
This card also has a joystick port. I compiled modules for my Microsoft
sidewinder joystick, attached it to the correct port, used MAKEDEV to
creat the js devices in /dev, loaded the joystick module in
/etc/X11/XF86Config and for good measure rebooted. However it still
doesn't work either. Even after insmod'ing the joystick module, when I
run the xjscal program, I get the message:
Cannot open /dev/js0
even as root. The permissions on /dev/js0 are:
crw-rw---- 1 root root 15, 0 Jan 7 08:57 /dev/js0
Once again, what did I do wrong?
I realize I've asked a lot of questions today. Any and all answers will
be greatly appreciated.
Thanks,
--
Jaldhar H. Vyas <jaldhar@debian.org>
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