[Techtalk] Sound card gone missing - OSS/ALSA woes

Gwen Morse gwen.morse at gmail.com
Wed Mar 14 05:57:37 UTC 2012


On Wed, Mar 14, 2012 at 12:57 PM, agoats at compuserve.com
<agoats at compuserve.com> wrote:
> Have you tried re-running alsaconf? I had similar problems in the past and
> redoing the configuration with alsaconf fixed the issues.
>
> Alvin


alsaconf isn't on my system and checking google quickly it seems to be
deprecated. Howvever, alsactl was listed as a possible alternative. It
runs and tells me I have no sound cards installed.

[root at localhost goldmoon]# alsactl init
alsactl: init:1743: No soundcards found...


>
> On 03/13/2012 08:07 PM, Gwen Morse wrote:
>>
>> I left my Fedora 16 laptop in the hands of my minimally techy husband
>> while travelling and he's managed to break something.
>>
>> Here's what I know...I mentioned before leaving that I had been
>> reading about the OSS/ALSA history and was thinking of switching over
>> from ALSA to OSS when I got back.
>>
>> He decided to "surprise" me by doing it himself. He deleted all the
>> ASLA packages and ran an OSS bat file installer. It didn't work (no
>> surprise there) and then he went and reinstalled all the ALSA
>> packages. It still doesn't work.
>>
>> The audio card is listed in lspci, so I know the system still
>> recognizes it. It's also listed but greyed out in Phonon (KDE GUI
>> sound manager):
>>
>> 00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset
>> Family High Definition Audio Controller (rev 05)
>>         Subsystem: ASUSTeK Computer Inc. Device 1a13
>>         Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 22
>>         Memory at f6a00000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=16K]
>>         Capabilities:<access denied>
>>         Kernel driver in use: oss_hdaudio
>>
>> The internal audio analog stereo is also greyed out in Phonon. That
>> was my normal fallback when the actual sound card wouldn't work. I do
>> see that the oss driver is the one the system is trying to use (kernel
>> driver is oss_hdaudio)
>>
>> What I'm not sure about is what stage it's at (maybe the OSS install
>> was corrupted, maybe it just needs an additional configuration step).
>> I haven't done much (possibly any) sound card management and it's been
>> a good 5-7 years since I've build modules into a kernel (so those
>> skills are a bit rusty).
>>
>> At this point I'd like to know how to clean up what hubby did and
>> restore ALSA (for now). Then I can read over everything and possibly
>> get support directly from the OSS folks (apparently we paid for the
>> drivers) when I'm ready.
>>
>> Thanks in advance for any help provided (or even just taking the time
>> to read this).
>>
>> Gwen
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>


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