At different times during the last one and a half years, I tried to make sound work on my new Gentoo install on a computer with Gigabyte GA-MA790FXT-UD5P motherboard and MSI ATI Radeon R4770 graphic card.
Previously, I successfully solved the sound problems in Gentoo either with alsamixer or by compiling the right driver into the kernel but on this computer these two approaches failed so far. In my penultimate attempt to solve this problem, I spent no less than one week trying to compile the right driver into the then 4th Linux kernel with no result. At the beginning, I managed to get a sound from this computer after some kernel configurations but they turned out to be unstable in the sense that later the same kernel configurations resulted in no sound. (I have used git to control all my experiments with the kernel configurations, so I am quite sure that configurations of the kernel for which I sometimes got the sound and later did not was indeed the same.) My first explanation to this phenomena was that after recompiling a kernel I also have to recompile xorg-server and some sound related packages. So I have tried this with no result again. And, of course, I have always used alsamixer to make sure that no sound channels are muted. Finally, I decided that I just cannot find the right combination of sound drivers and gave up because at that time I could not spend on this more than one week. But last month I found out about the gentoo-kernel package and decided to try once more. I was almost sure that, after installing this package, I will finally get the sound. So, I have installed the latest, 5.4.64, version of this package. As a result, the computer rebooted in the new Linux kernel and everything worked and still works like a charm except for the sound as it is still absent. :( So I definitely (and desperately) need your help and promise to follow all your suggestions. (But, please, take into account that I can compile on this computer only during weekends.) As the following command shows lspci | grep "Audio" 00:14.2 Audio device: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] SBx00 Azalia (Intel HDA) 01:00.1 Audio device: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] RV710/730 HDMI Audio [Radeon HD 4000 series] This computer has two sound devices. The first of them, SBx00 Azalia, is probably built into the motherboard, and it is where I am trying to get a sound from. The second one is probably built into the Radeon graphic card and I am not going to use it at all unless it can output the sound through the motherboard audio jacks. My current kernel configuration is exactly the same as in the gentoo-kernel-5.4.64 package as I have not changed anything there. And finally: installed on the same computer legacy operating system never had any sound problems.
