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

[agoats at compuserve.com]

It looks like it was dropped in alsa-utils 1.0.17-1, but I'm running 
1.0.24.2 which has  it back.

Running apropos alsa I show:
apropos alsa
aconnect []          (1)  - ALSA sequencer connection manager
alsaconf []          (8)  - configuration tool for the Advanced Linux 
Sound Architecture
alsactl []           (1)  - advanced controls for ALSA soundcard driver
alsactl init []      (7)  - alsa control management - initialization
alsamixer []         (1)  - soundcard mixer for ALSA soundcard driver, 
with ncurses interface
amidi []             (1)  - read from and write to ALSA RawMIDI ports
amixer []            (1)  - command-line mixer for ALSA soundcard driver
aoss []              (1)  - Wrapper script to facilitate use of the ALSA 
OSS compatibility library
aplay []             (1)  - command-line sound recorder and player for 
ALSA soundcard driver
arecord []           (1)  - command-line sound recorder and player for 
ALSA soundcard driver
aseqdump []          (1)  - show the events received at an ALSA 
sequencer port
aseqnet []           (1)  - ALSA sequencer connectors over network
speaker []           (1)  - test - command-line speaker test tone 
generator for ALSA

alsaconf would set up the card if it can find it and alsactl would let 
you adjust advanced features of the card.

You might try

alsactl init

which did find my hardware:

Found hardware: "HDA-Intel" "Realtek ALC889" 
"HDA:10ec0889,14627576,00100004" "0x1462" "0x7576"
Hardware is initialized using a generic method

Checking what the current alsaconf does:

Alsaconf is a simple shell script which tries to detect the sound cards 
on your system and writes a suitable configuration file for
        ALSA. It will try to guess what GNU/Linux distribution you're 
running, and will act accordingly to the standards of that  distribu-
        tion, if specific support is available.

        Alsaconf will write a module-init-tools (or modutils) snippet 
which can be then used by module-init-tools (or modutils) to load the
        correct parameters for your sound card.


This might be what you're looking for.

Alvin




On 03/14/2012 12:57 AM, Gwen Morse wrote:
> 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
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> Techtalk mailing list
>>> Techtalk at linuxchix.org
>>> http://mailman.linuxchix.org/mailman/listinfo/techtalk
>>>
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