Erik Jälevik wrote:
I am a Debian newbie and I'm trying to get a Soundblaster PCI128 (CT4810) working. I'm running Debian 3.0 with kernel 2.2.20. I have added the relevant users to the audio group but I keep getting "No such device" errors when trying: cat /usr/share/sounds/pop.wav > /dev/audio
Two things.If you have reasonably modern hardware, it would probably be worth it to upgrade to a 2.4 kernel. You can either get one from
kernel.org or, alternatively, download one of the Debian kernels from testing or unstable. You can do the latter by going to packages.debian.org and searching for kernel-source-2.4 and selecting "any" for the distribution. I recommend gettin the 2.4.22, as it is the latest available stable kernel. Also, I believe that to cat an audio file to the audio device it must be in some raw audio format. I don't believe that .wav is such a format.
I have searched the howtos and newsgroups and it seems I don't have the correct driver compiled into my kernel. As I've never compiled a kernel before, I thought I'd check if there's anything else I can try to get it working?
Follow this excellent howto on building a new kernel: http://newbiedoc.sourceforge.net/system/kernel-pkg.html It is brain dead easy. If you are still uncomfortable with it, apt-cache search kernel-image will show you the avialable kernel images for Woody.
lspci gives: 00:09.0 Multimedia audio controller: Ensoniq 5880 AudioPCI (rev 02)
I believe that some folks have been having trouble with this chip. Try searching the list archives for more details.
So it seems to pick up the card. (Not sure if it's the right one though, do SBs have Ensoniq chips?) However, dmesg doesn't print any info at all about soundcards. lsmod doesn't list anything sound-related and /lib/modules only contains one file called 2.2.20-idepci. cat /dev/sndstat also gives a "No such device" error.
If there is not dmesg ouput for the soundcard, then you don't have support for it in the kernel (either modular or compiled in). Since it is a stock kernel, basically everything but the bare essentials is compiled as a module. I don't know which driver corresponds to that card (anyone want to help out on that), but if you know which one it is, a quick modprobe <modulename> should get you going.
How can I find out which driver I need and is there any way of adding it without recompiling the kernel?
If the module has already been compiled, the modprobe will do it. If not, I think you are stuck recompiling the kernel.
Many thanks, Erik
-Roberto
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