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ALSA sound setup



Hi all. 
	I'm a bit stumped in my efforts to get ALSA sound working...
and I've been unable to find much in the way of docs for ALSA
(No "man alsa", /usr/doc/alsa* adds up to a couple examples, several
copies of the changelog, and some copyright info... and alsa-project.org
seems to have  little or nothing beyond the "sound-card matrix"). Any
help and/or pointers to (helpful) docs would be greatly appreciated... 
	So here's the problem:

--The short version--
I've installed alsa v 0.9 to drive my Creative Labs SBLive! 5.1,
and it seems to think it's working:
  miguel# /etc/init.d/alsa start
  Starting ALSA sound driver (version 0.9.0beta10): emu10k1.
  Restoring ALSA mixer settings...done.
  miguel#

But I have no sound. When I run alsaconf it exits with an error saying: 
  amixer: Mixer attach default error: No such file or directory
  Could not initialize the mixer, the card was probably
  not detected correctly.
  miguel#

--The long version--
Please forgive me if I include irrelevant stuff or leave out key info...
I'm still rather a newbie.  So here's everthing that I thought might be
relevant...  

        I installed alsa-base 0.9+0beta12, alsa-modules 0.9+0beta10, and
alsa-utils 0.5.10-1... This required me to upgrade to kernel 2.4.16-686.
Done (and verified with uname that that is the currently booted kernel).
        I established that my card (SBLive! 5.1) is called emu10k1, and
told ALSA to use that module...
lsmod has this to say:
snd-card-emu10k1        1952   0  (unused)
snd-emu10k1            47200   0  [snd-card-emu10k1]
snd-pcm                46176   0  [snd-emu10k1]
snd-timer               9056   0  [snd-pcm]
snd-rawmidi            11456   0  [snd-emu10k1]
snd-hwdep               3456   0  [snd-emu10k1]
snd-util-mem            1184   0  [snd-emu10k1]
snd-ac97-codec         22848   0  [snd-emu10k1]
snd-seq-device          3744   0  [snd-card-emu10k1 snd-rawmidi]
snd                    23336   0  [snd-card-emu10k1 snd-emu10k1 snd-pcm
snd-timer snd-rawmidi snd-hwdep snd-util-mem snd-ac97-codec
snd-seq-device]
soundcore               3556   2  [snd]
(Including only the results that look (to my untrained eye) relevant.)

lspci says this:
00:12.0 Multimedia audio controller: Creative Labs SB Live! EMU10k1 (rev 07)
00:12.1 Input device controller: Creative Labs SB Live! (rev 07)
(again showing only the obviously relevant entries)

Now when I run alsaconf, it doesn't detect my card; so I choose SB Live
off the list, hit okay, hit enter a few times to accept the identifier
CARD_0, the max. dac 128, max. adc 64... Then it says:
   OK, 1 card(s) configured.
   will prepare the card for playing now.
   Now I'll run '/etc/init.d/alsa start', then I'll use 'amixer'...

Then we get this response:
   Loading driver:
   Starting ALSA sound driver (version 0.9.0beta10): emu10k1.
   Restoring ALSA mixer settings...done.
   Setting the PCM volume to 100% and the Master output volume to 50%
   amixer: Mixer attach default error: No such file or directory
   Could not initialize the mixer, the card was probably
   not detected correctly.

And every time I log in to Gnome, or launch Gnome's mixer applet, I get
a popup error saying "couldn't open mixer device /dev/mixer".  When I
try amixer as root or regular user, I get more of "Mixer attach default
error: No such file or directory".

Now, I *know* the card is good because it works (beautifully) under
WinXP (Dual-boot machine... I haven't made a clean break so far)...

So... please somebody give me a nudge in the right direction.

	Many thanks,
	Chris

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