On Wed, 2006-06-21 at 14:07 -0500, Robert Citek wrote: > As for sound cards, I know nothing about them. Anyone got the > expertise and time to get me up to speed?
Well the good news is that Debian has gotten a *lot* better about sound cards. That being said, a lot of the older onboard sound chips are not recognized, which is where the PCI or ISA cards come in. If it's ISA you'll need to use isapnptools just like for ISA modems. For PCI just lspci should tell you what you've got. In either case, once you figure out what you've got you need to get the driver loaded. To test it on the fly, you just load it via 'modprobe', e.g., 'modprobe sb' would load the soundblaster module. If it loads without error, then you can put an entry into /etc/modules so it will load on boot in the future. In a good number of cases, Debian simply recognizes it and loads the appropriate driver once you've installed the card. I suppose if you knew there was a module for the sound card but it wasn't already available, you could add it by using modconf ... but that really shouldn't be necessary. A caveat: if you put in a physical card, remember to disable the onboard sound in BIOS. Otherwise, you end up with a very confused computer, and get weird errors, and can't figure out why sound won't work. A second caveat: missing or bad CD-ROM sound cable or not plugged properly into the sound card (or worse still plugged into the onboard sound rather than the installed card) can be another stumper. You can also try plugging in headphones directly into the CD player, if you aren't getting output to the speakers. Finally, there is a good overview of getting sound working under linux at <http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Sound-HOWTO/index.html> for when you've got to do it the old-fashioned way (as may be the case for ISA cards). t. -- ***Propositions arrived at purely by logical means are completely empty as regards reality. - Albert Einstein *** ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~--> Yahoo! Groups gets a make over. See the new email design. http://us.click.yahoo.com/XISQkA/lOaOAA/yQLSAA/zCsqlB/TM --------------------------------------------------------------------~-> Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/bworks_shop/ <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
