No sound! Please help me. I can run videos on my windows partition, but

[morningglory]

Mandrake partition does not support sound. The box has always been this way. Do you guys have a hint? Thanks.

[qnr]

1. Simple question first. Alsa is muted by default, have you brought up the

mixer and unmuted it?

[RoyGBiv]

2. Speaking of ...

Do you have any idea why? This makes no sense to me. A friend, a computer professional who has been using Linux since there was a Linux, recently had a problem with his system sound that turned out to be ALSA being muted after a reinstall. He never even thought to look there until he got to the point of checking even the dumb stuff, and sure enough, that was it.

Also, it doesn't seem to be muted by default always. I installed the ALSA libraries from source on my Slackware box, and the first thing I did after doing so was run alsamixer. Nothing was muted.

I'm guessing some distros have it muted by default, but that's purely a guess.

[qnr]

3. I really don't know off-hand. According to the Alsa website, it is muted

by default, so any distributions where it isn't have unmuted it, rather than the other way around. I agree though, it is such a simple matter that it doesn't occur to you, so it's frustrating.

[morningglory]

4. How do I get to the mixer?

I found in Sound Config that my card is using the ALSA driver. Don't see a mixer for changing the mute.

[qnr]

5. If you have alsa installed, then you probably have alsa-utils installed,

in which case you can run amixer (which is command line driven) or alsamixer (which has an ncurses interface)

Open a terminal and type alsamixer<Enter> You should see something similar to this:



Use the cursor arrow keys to move between components (some are off-screen) and change the volume, and then <Esc> to save. There are lots of other mixers, many with GUIs, but this will do what you need.

[morningglory]

6. I typed that in a terminal window and got"alsamixer: function snd_ctl open

failed for default: No such device". I typed cd .. and re issued the command and got the same thing. Typed cd .. again and same result. Which directory should I be in to type this command line? Thanks a lot.

[qnr]

7. It sounds like you need to run alsaconf to set configure alsa to use your

sound card. I don't know what distro you are using, but you have probably got some sort of configuration wizard if you want to use it.

[Tandalayo_Scheisskopf]

8. Open up...

Mandrake(Mandriva) control center and go to the hardware section. Look at the sound card as listed. see what driver module it is loading. If there is none being loaded, you are gonna have to choose one.

What motherboard are you using and what soundcard(if any). You can find that out from the windows side with a program called SiSoft Sandra Lite(It's free).