[SLUG] Sound card

[Gavin Baker]

On Thu, 2004-11-04 at 16:53 -0500, john at johnallsopp.co.uk wrote:

> > Do an 'lspci' and paste the line(s) that look like your sound card.
> >
> > Also, does /dev/mixer and /dev/dsp exist?

> OK, the only relevant part of lspci seems to be:
> 
> 00:0c.0 SCSI storage controller: Advanced System Products, Inc ABP940-U /
> ABP960-U (rev 03)

That looks more like an SCSI storage controller to me ;)

Well from Jamies mail it looks like your card does indeed have an
emu10k1 chip, which is all I was checking.

> Ummm, dev/mixer and dev/dsp seem to exist as 1 byte orange things in ls
> -l. That's not good is it. I'm sure I spotted the mixer thing as not being
> installed when I was trying (and failing) to use the package manager
> earlier. I'll have a play.

Thats fine. Orange probably means 'character device'. Everything is a
file on linux. Including hardware devices. The size of character devices
doesn't mean much.

Anyway. The driver, in the form of a kernel module, that your card will
use is called emu10k1. Try this, as root.

   rmmod emu10k1     (remove the module, if its loaded)
   dmesg -c          (Clear the kernels internal log)
   modprobe emu10k1  (Load the driver)

Now if you do 'dmesg', you will get information from the module. If that
looks good, and emu10k1 doesn't give any errors, then the driver is
sorted. 

Now test it, still as root try

   cat /dev/urandom > /dev/dsp

Press CTRL-C to stop it. You should hear white noise if all is good. 

If this doesn't work, lets look at the output of the last dmesg.

Also, run 'aumix' and check your levels are up, and lets look at the
output of 'ls -l /dev/dsp' and the output of 'id' run as your normal
user (not root), in case it's just that your user doesn't have
permission to access audio devices.

Regards,
Gav