I had windows on my computer till 2 weeks ago and sound card worked fine. speakers work fine volume turned up.

fedora core 2 -downloaded and installed 2 weeks

cpu athalon
mb soyo dragon -something
sound card built onto the mother board

KDE soundcard detection says that my sound card is a cmedia cm8738 snd-cmi pci


i checked /var/log/mesages and found this

localhost modprobe: FATAL: Error running install command for sound_slot_1

obviously a problem

so I decided the best course was to try and load a new driver.

I found a alsa driver on the internet. alsa.com and tried to install that.

/var/log still has fatal error

however i did find several messages like this if it means anything to any one

localhost udev[3186]: creating device node '/udev/snd/pcmC0D0c'

what do i try next

[tsunam]

UGHUUU~ my post got deleted...here we go again (warning this guide is from someone who does a source distro..and so it might be slightly different..the overall steps i tell you to do are the same though)

To start we need to know what your exact chipset on the audio is. To do this do a.

grep -i audio /proc/pci

it should turn up a:

Multimedia audio controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82C686 AC97 Audio
Controller (rev 64).

If it doesn't or you already know what the chipset it is we can skip this part

Knowing your chipset we can now proceed to http://www.alsa-project.org/alsa-doc/ and find what driver we need to tell alsa to use.

Based on this information we can now install the alsa-driver for our soundcard. First edit /etc/make.conf and add a new option called ALSA_CARDS to it. Inside this variable you declare the soundcard driver you want to use:

ALSA_CARDS="via82xx"

having installed alsa from a rpm no doubt you should now have a /etc/modules.d/alsa area...

go into that and edit it so that it looks something like this for the custom or section it tells you to edit.

alias snd-card-0 snd-via82xx
# The following is only needed when you want OSS compatibility
alias sound-slot-0 snd-card-0
alias /dev/mixer snd-mixer-oss
alias /dev/dsp snd-pcm-oss
alias /dev/midi snd-seq-oss

Now run modules-update to save the changes you made to the alsa file into /etc/modules.conf

Followed by

# rc-update add alsasound boot
# /etc/init.d/alsasound start

to let the kernel know that it need to load it...and the second line actually starts it.

Next you need to unmute channels (since by default they are muted)

amixer set Master 100 unmute
# amixer set PCM 100 unmute
(Only if the above isn't sufficient
# amixer set Center 100 unmute
# amixer set Surround 100 unmute

amixer will pull up a nice console display of all the channels to look at and change the volume

after this...reboot and see if it loads proper at kernel startup..and test to see if your audio works Hopefully it should.

hope this helps you.

i installed the alsa driver

i have opened the alsa mixer but i dont see a mute
i looked on kde for kmix and there is no mute button

so i tried this

[root@localhost root]# /etc/init.d/alsasound start
ALSA driver is already running.
[root@localhost root]#


i tried this

[root@localhost root]# aplay /usr/share/sounds/generic.wav
aplay: main:507: audio open error: No such device
[root@localhost root]#

you wrote .....you should now have a /etc/modules.d/alsa area...



i dont have a /etc/modules.d/ but i do have
file:/etc/makedev.d/sound

which begins like this


# Aliases for sound devices.
a sound audio
a sound audioctl
a sound dsp
a sound midi
a sound mixer
...
..
..

so this seems the right place for the sound card definition
i made a copy of that file and deleted their entries and added mine from a how to on alsa
they say to put in /etc/modules.conf or conf.modules. i dont have either but i do have a

file:/etc/makedev.d/sound
so i made it like this

# ALSA portion
alias char-major-116 snd
alias snd-card-0 snd-cmipci
# module options should go here

# OSS/Free portion
alias char-major-14 soundcore
alias sound-slot-0 snd-card-0

# card #1
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



now i noticed the speaker icon on the kpanel next to my clock has a redx and kmix wont start
it seems like kmix is nolonger an option

uuff i think i might go back to windows with all this trouble

[tsunam]

Bah that's why i hate different distro's having vastly different systems for storing their information.
What i was able to find on linux questions is this http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...ght=alsa+setup look thru there and see if its any help. if not, and no one else has any idea's or anythienre. The fedora forum on linuxquestions should be able to help you better then some of us can. We all sorta know our distro's the best...and search and or try to help where we can...just cant always be exactly right

i might just try another distro.

one last question. this distro could recognize the name of the card and chip set why did it not install.
i looked on a hcl and this card was supported on at least red hat 7 and red hat 8.

[liviu]

Hiya raccoon,

Try to follow instructions (it has FAQs as well) here:

http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Sound-HOWTO/index.html

Unfortunately I can't do more for you right now.

i re-installed to fix the kmix problem

sound works!

however i did find a known bug in gnome. linuxquestions has a link to a fix

this probably was the original problem but i dont use gnome much so i might not have recognized it

thanks all