Re: Sound Card Blues

[Kent West <westk@acu.edu>]

jmj@charm wrote:

> Hello all 
> I have potato 2.2 installed on my system, I also have a Sound Blaster awe
> 1024 card. A friend debian-user very kindly gave me a hand recompiling the
> kernel to get the Sound Blaster drivers installed (this was magic as far as I
> remember nothing comes to mind about how this was achieved). I have
> installed freeamp as my mp3 player and I want to play mp3's from my windows
> partition. The partition is mounted correctly and freeamp sees the files I
> want to play. However when I try to run the files it tells me that audio is
> not configured properly. I have looked through the list of HOWTO's in the
> /usr/doc/HOWTO directory but can find nothing about sound specifically. 
> I would like to know how to check the Kernel configuration to see if the
> right drivers were installed, and install them if necessary, also If I do
> have the correct drivers installed how do I configure audio to get the card
> working.
> Thank you for taking the time to read this message
> John-Mark


I'm no expert, but here's some clues.

Try the command "cat /dev/sndstat". This may or may not give you any info.

You need to have access to the sound device files. Usually this means 
you need to be in the group "audio". I believe the correct command to 
add your user to that group is "adduser <username> audio". You'll then 
need to log out/in for this to take affect. The command "groups" should 
report what groups you're currently a member of.

You also might try "cat <some .wav file> > /dev/audio".

You can also do a "dmesg" to see any sound hardware-related messages 
that scrolled by on bootup.

And an "lsmod" to see what sound modules are loaded, although you imply 
that the drivers were compiled into the kernel instead of as modules.

None of these are solutions, but maybe they'll give you an extra piece 
to the puzzle.