Kent West wrote:
<snip concerning Kent's inability to get sound out of AC'97/intel810 integrated sound on a Gateway E3400 using ALSA>
Andrea replied:
You don't say if you added in the /etc/modutils the requested aliases for your sound card, mine where created quite correctly by alsaconf, but i remember well, in the sound card definition the name of my sound card was missing. I attach my alias file as example: # --- BEGIN: Generated by ALSACONF, do not edit. --- # --- ALSACONF verion 0.4.3b --- alias char-major-116 snd alias snd-card-0 snd-card-via686a alias char-major-14 soundcore alias sound-slot-0 snd-card-0 alias sound-service-0-0 snd-mixer-oss alias sound-service-0-1 snd-seq-oss alias sound-service-0-3 snd-pcm-oss alias sound-service-0-8 snd-seq-oss alias sound-service-0-12 snd-pcm-oss alias sound-slot-1 snd-mpu401-uart options snd snd_major=116 snd_cards_limit=1 snd_device_mode=0660 snd_device_gid=29 snd_device_uid=0 options snd-card-via686a snd_index=0 snd_id=CARD_0 snd_mpu_port=0x300 snd_joystick=0x300 snd_pbk_frame_size=128 snd_cap_frame_size=128 # --- END: Generated by ALSACONF, do not edit. --- In the list of your loaded module, i haven't found a snd-mixer entry, try looking in your syslog for some error, and as a last tip, look in /proc/asound to check the card status...
This led me to another clue. There's nothing in /etc/modules.conf like this. Nor is there anything like this in /etc/modutils/aliases. However, the alsaconf program creates a file /etc/alsa/modutils/0.5 that has this sort of info in it. But as far as I can tell, /etc/modules.conf is never made aware of this file. I've tried running update-modules and depmod; I've also tried modifying /etc/modutils/paths to contain the line "/etc/alsa/modutils/0.5" and/or "/etc/alsa/modutils/", but then the system complains about a bad line in /etc/modules.conf. I also noticed that /etc/modutils/alsa-path was pointing to /lib/modules/'uname -r'/alsa, whereas the actual modules are in /lib/modules/'uname -r'/misc; I've changed /etc/modutils/alsa-path accordingly.
Maybe part of the problem is that dselect doesn't know about alsa modules for a 2.4.2 kernel, only for 2.2.17 and 2.2.18, so I've downloaded and compiled the modules and libs from the alsa site.
/RantAt any rate, I'm getting really frustrated, and am about to give up on getting sound to work on my new computer with Debian. I'm not giving up on Debian by any means, but it is making me feel less gung-ho to recommend it to newbies like I've been doing. :-( Configuring hardware is still just way too hard for even someone who's technically literate. Petrely is right; we need standards (without the straight-jacket that could conceivably bring with it). At the least, we need good documentation, and that's hard to come by with the extreme complexity and variability of Linux systems.
/End of Rant