Sound Help

[Lynn]

I'm new to Linux and feel really dumb. I can't get any sounds to work on Linux. Does anyone know what I'm doing wrong. It says there is no sound card detected but I know I have a sound card. I need help please....

[nalg0rath]

(the following only works if you use ALSA and not OSS)
If your sound isn't wokring the most likely causes are:
- your sound is muted.
- your soundcard isn't detected.

Shortcut:
Some distibutions have automatic configuration tools that can do Step 1-3
for you. This command is usually

# alsaconfig

or as in Red Hat:

# sndconfig

Step 1: Find out what soundcard you have
The first thing you have to do to be able to fix this is to find out what soundcard you have. This can easily be done by opening the console an typing in the command:

# lspci | grep -i audio

This command should display what PCI souncard(s) you have in your computer.
To find USB soundcards you'll have to run another command that checks if the computer can find any device that is connceted through USB:

# dmesg | grep -i usb

Step 2: Find out what driver your soundcard uses
The easiers way to find out what driver your soundcard uses it to Google for it. When you find out what driver your soundcard uses you can now go on to the next step.

Step 3: Probing for your driver
In some cases your driver is already probed, to find out run:

# lsmod

If you can find the name of your driver there you can skip this step and go on to Step 4.

To find out what drivers you have on your system that you can probe you can run:

# find /lib/modules/[kernel version]/ -type f -iname '*.o' -or -iname '*.ko'

where you replace "[kernel version]" with the version number of the kernel that you're currently running. If you dont know what your kernel version is, run the following to find out.

# uname -r

When you see that the driver exists on your system you can run:

# modprobe [driver]

to probe the driver. Here is an example:

# modprobe snd-emu10k1

(this probes the SoundBlaster -driver).
If you have successfully probed your sondcards driver you can go on to Step 4.

To find out how to automatically probe for the soundcard at boot you'll have to read you distos manual because the way you do it can be quite disto-specific.

If you can't find your driver on the system you might have to recompile your kernel and then enable the support for your driver, alternativly you can download a driver from the vendors homepage that doesn't require a kernel re-compilation.
To find out how to compile a kernel, check this HOWTO out: http://www.linuxdocs.org/HOWTOs/Kernel-HOWTO.html

Step 4: Umuting the sound
There is a few ways to unmute the sound, at least there is a number of programs (mixers) that can do it. Here is a list of program that will do:

• alsamixer - a command-line driven mixer for alsa
  amixer - a command line mixer
  kmix - KDE Mixer
  ... and more

If you want to know how you use these programs, RTFM. TO read the manual for the programs just type in command-line:

# man [programname]

To store the ALSA -sound settings to the next boot you can run:

alsactl store

Sorry for the long and extensive answer, but I hope you can find it helpful.

[Hyperios39]

Hi Lynn,


Had same prob with SUSE, until i went to SUSE 10.3 it finally saw both Phillips Psc703 Sound card and Onboard Azalia HD sound. You can also check the ALSA website to see if your card is supported, but niether of mine were there. Good Luck .....let there be Rock!


Http://download.opensuse.org


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