On Sat, 5 Feb 2005, Karsten Baumgarten wrote:
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Simple answer: You followed the wrong section of the guide. :)
If you have built-in ALSA support, there is no need to mess around with /etc/modules.conf and stuff. The only thing you need to do is step 4.
Note that the ALSA driver in the kernel is usually not the most recent version. In case your card doesn't work properly using the built-in driver, disable the ALSA support in the kernel and follow _all_ the steps from your post.
Regards,
KarstenThanks for the rapid reply. If the only step I need is step 4, then should I undo steps 1 and 2?
1. Add to /etc/modules.conf:
ALSA_CARDS="cs4236"
2. Edit /etc/modules.d/alsa to say:
alias snd-card-0 snd-cs4236
How then does alsa know what driver to use?
1) Because you have made the correct module available by selecting it during kernel compilation;
2) Because during the hardware detection phase of the boot process, the kernel communicates with the card, which identifies itself, allowing the kernel to know which driver to load (the kernel knows which drivers go with which cards-- that's its job), and/or you have added the module to /etc/modules.d.autoload/kernel-2.6;
3) Because you have run alsaconf, which also (usually) detects your card and sets up the alsa config files to look for it.
The ALSA_CARDS line is only needed if you emerge the alsa-drivers package (it tells the package which cards to compile drivers for; otherwise it compiles available drivers, which is a waste of time and space if you know what card you have).
Alsaconf should set up /etc/modules.d/alsa itself when run, assuming the card is correctly detected.
If I don't worry about this and just jump forward to alsamixer, I get:
alsamixer alsamixer: function snd_ctl_open failed for default: No such device
Any tips?
No, I'd actually be interested in knowing what this is as well. I'm getting it too, but under SuSE 9.2, and an "old" 2.6.8 kernel. It doesn't seem to be a problem, insofar as sound does work, but I don't particularly like not knowing why it's happening. I don't remember seeing this error under higher-versioned kernels I used under Gentoo, or in fact under Gentoo at all.
This leads me to wonder if it's a KDE issue, as I did not use KDE under Gentoo, but do under SuSE, and (aside from the distribution backend, which I know little about), that's "the only difference" (figuratively speaking) between my installations.
The only other possibility that comes to my mind, but is unconfirmed, is that I recently got a real soundcard and disabled my onboard sound chip. I don't know if I was getting this error before I did that; if not, then that would explain both the error --the onboard sound chip is found first, being a motherboard resource, but is disabled in the BIOS, so fails to open-- and the fact that the error seems irrelevant-- because the disabled onboard sound (which I presume is the "default" referred to) is not in fact configured as snd-card-0 and is not used. So maybe it's alsamixer or alsaconf that's behind the times.
What is your sound setup? Does sound work despite this annoying error? If using KDE, you might want to use qamix or KMix to control the sound channels.
HTH, Holly
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