Monday, December 18, 2006

Sound Off

Which is not what I want. I want it on. So here we go. Now that I've sort of got a handle on my APIC issue I thought I'd take a crack at getting sound working.

According to the Alsa Project the driver the NVidia MCP51 High Definition Audio Card is the intel8x0. As far as I can tell, this is a lie. I tried every way from sunday to get that driver to load. Nothing ever happened. I got fed up with it and tried shotgunning.

For those of you who don't build your own kernel (or haven't shotgunned before), it basically works like this. When you don't know what driver works, you compile them all in and see what happens. This works a remarkably high amount of the time for my network and sound card.

Not this time. The driver snd-hda-intel claimed the card, but /dev/dsp did not get made and mpg123 didn't work. Crud. I decided to try using the alsa-drivers package since it generally contains newer stuff than the kernel. I followed the Gentoo Alsa Guide and switched from kernel sound to user-space sound. I ignored the bit about setting a specific card and compiled them all in. Alsaconf found the card and installed the snd-hda-intel. So much for the website.

Of course, I still didn't have /dev/dsp but I did have some stuff in /dev/snd. Per suggestion from the Gentoo Alsa Guide I tried using aplay to play something (a random wave from /usr/share). It actually worked. I played a crappy wave in all it's 8-bit glory. Now I just had to figure out why nothing else would play.

I started poking around in /proc/asound to see if anything looked interesting and I noticed that I was missing the oss stuff. On a whim, I installed the ALSA-OSS compatibility layer and /dev/dsp appeared. On the up side, I now have sound. On the down side, it's obviously OSS. I'll fight the ALSA battle another day.

4 Comments:

Blogger rreagan3 said...

i've got sound working with SuSE 10.2, the volume and mute hotkeys even work. It took me a while to figure out how to get an mp3 and other codecs to play, but i'm new to this stuff, so that's no surprise. What I still can't get to work is the headphone jack.... Still a mystery to me

11:00 AM  
Blogger Matt said...

I haven't actually tried the headphones yet, just the speakers. I'll test out my setup as soon as I get home and let you know.

7:40 AM  
Blogger Matt said...

I tested my headphone jack and it doesn't work. Sound continues to come out of the speakers regardless of plugging anything into any of the sound ports. The investigation continues.

11:12 AM  
Blogger Prakash.A.S said...

Hello gordon...
May be this is the late comment for you. I have a acer 4520 laptop and the config is AMD Athlon 64 bit, nvidia card...Now i m facing the same problem for my sound card. I tried the alsa driver. My card has detected but sound is not coming.
I showed the same problem with lot forums; but no solution, yet. This is really bad.
If you have any solution for this sound card problem, plz mail me, asprakash83@gmail.com

5:40 AM  

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