Mandrake Linux 10.2

Newbie question on sound card setup

[electrocad]

Hello to all

I am just setting up my first Linux system, I have installed Mandrake Linux from the "Mini" iso and downloaded all of the packages and updates, everything seems fine except for the sound system which Linux will not recognise, it is a Creative CT4180, any help much appreciated.

Thanks

electrocad

[brakthepoet]

Are you getting a specific error, or just not getting any sound?

If there are no errors, and it's just the lack of sound, ALSA mutes sound by default. Assuming that you have ALSA installed, you will need to unmute the sound using alsamixer.

Type in alsamixer at the command line. Use the "w" key to raise the volume on both left and right, and use the "x" key to lower the volume on both and right. Use "q", "z", "e", and "c" to lower and raise specific channels.

If you are getting an error, what does the error message say?

[electrocad]

Hi - thanks for your reply.

At the end of the "initialising peripherals" a popup box (Informational - artsmessage) says "Sound server informational message : Error while initialising the Sound Driver : device: default cannot be opened for Playback (No such file or directory) The sound server will continue, using the null output device.
Any ideas?
Regards
electrocad

[brakthepoet]

A little hunting around showed up that the Creative CT4180 is also called Creative ViBRA-16 and SoundBlaster-16 PnP. From the alsa-project site [alsa-project.org], it looks like your soundcard should use the sb16 driver.

So, use the commands lspci and lsmod. For lspci, look for a line comtaining something like "multimedia audio controller". For lsmod, look for lines beginning with "snd". Report back on what you find. (You could post the full results of each, but I'm not sure if it will pass the TOS on posting code. You could give it a try and see what happens.)

You might also want to spend a little time browsing the alsa-project.org site, as they have a lot of info on configuring sound.

As a sidenote, if you've been trying to find information on search engines about your problem, you will probably need to change "initialising" to "initializing". Doing that provided a lot of results of people in the same boat.

[electrocad]

Hi, thanks again for your reply, I have now changed the OS to Fedora 4 and everthing works just fine, I may well have a play around the Mandrake system later as I have kept this on a separate hard drive.

regards

electrocad