No sound on RH8

No sound whatsoever but sound card recognized

[knotty]

Recently installed RH8 and have no sound in anything. No system sounds, no cd player sound although it shows a cd is being played.

The card is a Soundblaster Live. The soundcard detection recognizes the module emu10k1. Turned up the mixer volume, aumix 2.7 present. But no still no sound.

Just once, I got the boot up message saying, "aumix missing" and something about a dsp file. Never got the message again.

Is there some kind of check list of all possible things that could be wrong?

Thanks!

[Josk]

Does /dev/dsp have the correct rights for the user you are using?

[knotty]

Ok, just checked the /dev/dsp and this is what I get:
dsp
dsp1
dsp56k

they all have crw-------

I don't know what this means.

knotty

[dingman]

crw-------

I don't know what this means.

It means that they are character devices which can be read from and written to by the owner of the file (probably root) and nobody else can do anything with them.

A more common (and more functional) configuration is to have a group, often named 'audio' to which the files also belong, and permissions crw-rw----. Then anyone who is a member of the 'audio' group would be able to use /dev/dsp. It's worth noting that there are other device files also involved in the sound card, such as /dev/mixer and /dev/midi*, which would also need to have the correct permissions set.

[amoore]

I seem to recall that RH8 installed itself in some ways so that it was muted by default. You may check that out.

Other than that, I'd look into a redhat support site, or the sound-howto or something.

Good luck

[littleman]

as root try 'chmod 660 /dev/dsp', then 'addgroup <you> audio'

[knotty]

Thanks for the replies. I'll try out changing the permissions on dsp next and report back.

I've read somewhere I think it was on linuxquestions.org that RedHat purposely left out certain parts of the sound system because of some open source confliction issues.

I don't understand why Redhat doesn't mention this sound problem they have with RH8 and a patch or fix or at least steer you in the right direction for newbies.

Thanks a lot!