Sound for RedHat 9?

[ZiaTioN]

I am trying to get my wifes sound working on her Redhat 9 box and it does not want to play nice. I run the sound card detection and the system finds the onboard via vt82xx ac97 controller but does not play a sound.

I checked the system audio levels by going to "Sound and Video" then "Audio Controls" and everything looked ok. Nothing was muted and everything was turned up. I ran "modprobe ac97_codec" and it seemed to execute successfully (no errors). I then checked her /etc/modules.conf file and it has the following entries:

alias eth0 tulip
alias usb-controller usb-uhci
alias sound-slot-0 via82cxxx_audio
post-install sound-slot-0 /bin/aumix-minimal -f /etc/.aumixrc -L >/dev/null 2>&1 || :
pre-remove sound-slot-0 /bin/aumix-minimal -f /etc/.aumixrc -S >/dev/null 2>&1 || :

So everything appears to be normal and correct. I then hopped on my RedHat 9 box to cross reference any settings and all her settings matched mine completely and my sound works. Any ideas? I have always had sound issues when dealing with all distros of Linux. I pray that they some day get it right.

[Void Main]

It sounds like it should be working (no pun intended). Did you get the sound to work in anything (KNOPPIX etc)? I am sure you've done all the simple things like checking the speakers out on your machine and making sure the cable is plugged into the correct jack and making sure the jacks are connected to the motherboard, etc. All that checked out and you do get sound out of it using a different distro then I would think about trying to get the ALSA drivers intalled and working:

http://freshrpms.net/docs/alsa/

[ZiaTioN]

Yeah I have checked all that. The machine in question is a dual boot with Windows XP and the speakers work fine when booted into Windows so the physical is all good.

I just don't understand how I could be running the same OS with the same speakers and same onboard audio and mine work and hers not.

[Void Main]

If they are the same machine and same OS then I would agree, that's very strange. I would still consider trying ALSA.

[Linux Frank]

I have always had sound issues when dealing with all distros of Linux. I pray that they some day get it right.

I believe, and I could be wrong - it often happens, but I was reading an article on this a few years ago. The problem is not so much getting sound to work. That is a piece of cake. The trouble is sorting out all the permissions (apparently very complex). The guy who wrote the article (I no longer have it) seemed to be saying that abusing the sound card permissions was an easy way for crackers to escalate into root permisson on the sytem. so all this slow sound development is the developers trying to build a a working, flexible, useable and secure sound system.

[worker201]

A lot of sound cards, especially on-board sound controller chips from laptops, are designed with Windows in mind, and the technical specifications are not always released (or releasable). But I've had no real problems with modern componentized sound cards. Fedora treats me very well in this respect.

[Void Main]

I just ran into a problem where my daughter had been logged in to their machine and then my son logged in and didn't have sound. I couldn't bring a mixer up or anything so I quickly realized that all the sound device files were still owned by my daughter. I manually chowned them to my son's ID and sound was again working for him. I'm not quite sure why the ownership didn't get set when he logged in, it should have. I'll have to investigate that a little more. At any rate, permissions is certainly another possibility that I forgot to ask about. Some of the files that you would need access to are:

/dev/audio*
/dev/beep
/dev/dsp*
/dev/midi*
/dev/mixer*
/dev/sequencer
/dev/snd/*
/dev/sndstat
/dev/sound/*

I may or may not have everything. These are all defined in /etc/security/console.perms (see "man 5 console.perms").