[Gllug] Sound fine under 2.4.26 but nothing under 2.6.8

[Nix]

On Mon, 06 Dec 2004, John Winters mused:
> Looking good.  At least you've enabled me to get sound on a box
> (Mini-ITX board) which has previously resisted months of concerted
> efforts to achieve sound.  Why isn't this sort of thing documented
> anywhere?

Well, the INSTALL in the alsa-driver source tarball says quite clearly

,----
| Note: All mixer channels are muted by default. You must use a native
|       or OSS mixer program to unmute appropriate channels (for example a
|       mixer from the alsa-utils package).
`----

and there is a file WARNING in the same place which says
(ungrammatically)

,----
| 
| WARNING!!! The mixer channels for the ALSA driver are muted by default!!!
| **************************************************************************
| You would use some ALSA or OSS mixer to set the appropriate volume.
`----

and that is printed at the end of `make install'.

I can't really see many ways in which the ALSA authors could have made
it more obvious, at least not without writing some actual end-user
documentation, which they appear to be manfully resisting :(

>            I've had a look at the ALSA sound site and the beginners'
> documentation on how to get it to work really is utterly, utterly
> dreadful.

It doesn't even say what on earth most of the packages are for!

What's alsa-firmware? When might I want to use it? What are the
bits of weird soundcard-specific stuff in there for?

`Sorry, guv, dunno.'

Not even the source code provides much of a clue.

>     A Microsoft-esque attitude seems to have taken over the whole
> world of Linux sound - "It'll work straight out of the box.  If it
> doesn't, tough."

Hasn't this always been true? :(

> I still can't get xmms or real player to work on this box - both freeze
> up when they try to make sound

noatun's my current bete noire: instant segfault on startup. Mind you,
I've not spent any time debugging it yet, because IMMS (suitably hacked
to cope with strings of works that must not be reordered, with a patch
that's almost in good enough shape to send upstream; must polish and
send) makes XMMS hard to do without, despite XMMS's horrible user
interface.

-- 
`The sword we forged has turned upon us
 Only now, at the end of all things do we see
 The lamp-bearer dies; only the lamp burns on.'
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