The Site With the Lamp

May 18, 2004

A few days ago I thought I had successfully configured and upgraded my kernel to 2.6.5. Apprently not. When I switched on my speakers after a lapse of few days, they had gone on strike.

Since upgrading the kernel I have been getting a couple of warnings about /dev/dsp not being accessible but I chose to ignore that to my great peril. Apparently the new kernel which uses alsa (Advances Linux Sound Architecture) failed to recognize my previously configured sound system (VIA82C).

Googling came up with a lot of different answers but all them sounded too complex. Usually the solutions to any problem that you encounter on linux is simple. So on a hunch I decided to visit alsa site and download and install the drivers and utilities.

When attempting to install the driver I was told that the kernel already has the driver configured, so skipping that step I next installed the libraries followed by the utilities. (You have to follow this order)

Then I ran the snddevices script, rebooted and then ran alsaconf - hey presto my speakers are beeping again. Now to recap.

1. Roll back any changes that you have done to your system to get your sound system to work. If you have compiled in devfs remove that too you don't need it.
2. Download and compile the alsa drivers, libraries and utilites.
3. run ./snddevices
4. reboot
5. run alsaconf
6. use aplay to playback some sound

If you find that the sound plays ok, you need to call
alsactl store
to make a permanent record of the settings and read it back with
alsactl restore

at the next boot time. Of course you can add this to your init script to make life a lot easier.