Sound in Debain Sarge

[jamez1988]

I want sound in my Debian installation.
Whenever I log in, I get a message saying there was a problem with the soundcard and that all sound will be rerouted to /dev/null/, or something like that.

I did a google for 'sound debain', but I didn't like any of the info I found.
Now, I may be a nerd, but I'm not a big enough geek to follow all the instructions for getting a sound card working in Debian. I don't even know half of what to fill in, much less how to recompile my kernal. I've just started using Debain a week ago, for petes sake!

On my old Mandrake 7.2 installation (now obsolete) all i had to do was open up a console and type in sndconfig.
Is there something like that for Debian? or a package I can apt-get to simplify the process?

edit: I rebooted and got the full text of the error.

Sound server information message:
Error while initializing the sound driver:
device /dev/dsp can't be opened (No such device)
The sound server will continue, using the null output device.

[bosox79]

What type of soundcard do you have? what module does it use? you could try using modconf to load the correct module

[jamez1988]

Honestly, I have no idea what sound card is in this thing. (it's a sound blaster compatable, I believe.) I've always just let windows autodetect it before.
Apparently, it was not autodetected correctly when I installed Debian. I might try rebooting in Knoppix, since that has pretty good autodetection, and checking the sound card type there.

[bosox79]

Knoppix was going to be my next suggestion, be sure to write down what module it detects for your sound card, you might even want to install knoppix or Mepis to your hard disk, both are very good debian based distro's and they are easy to install to your hard disk.
keep us posted on your progress:)

bosox

[jamez1988]

This is the info I got from Knoppix.
Soundcard: CS4237B Audio:WSS/SB driver=ad=1848
It's rather cryptic. What do I do with this newfound information?

[manual_overide]

firstly, make sure you've compiled in soundcard support and an appropriate driver into your kernel (or compile the modules and load them) If your card is a PCI card, run lspci to find out what the card actually is

then, make sure your user belongs to the audio group. debian doesn't do that by default.

next, if /dev/dsp really doesn't exist, run MAKEDEV in /dev RTFM for the options to create the sound devices

[CoffeeMan]

Well, for one thing, it is Debian, not Debain. I am a Debian Sarge user, and I never had trouble with sound, but to see which modules are loaded at this time, as Root, type lsmod in a terminal and find out if the proper module is loaded. To find module you need to load, get the model and do a google/linux search, then get the module into the kernel by using the modprobe command, then test it, if the sound works, use the rc-update command to make the module load at boot time. Have Fun.

[jamez1988]

Well, after many fiailings of sndconfig to work, I downloaded and installed ALSA. It failed. I finaly found some (semi) helpful instructions at http://www.sonic.net/~rknop/linux/debian_alsa.html and I fallowed them. Sound still failed to work. I tried like everything.
I finaly logged in on XFCE to check my email because I was tired of the long startup time for Gnome. I noted a little multimedia button on the toolbar and clicked it. XMMS started up. I clicked play as an oh-what-the-heck type of thing and loaded a mod file. It opened and the little pulse bar thing on XMMS started vibrating. Wait a minute. No error about a sound card. Thats strange. Hey, why is the volume on XMMS turned all the way down? I turned it up, and music poured forth from the speakers. Now all sound works. I suspect that if I turn off Gnome's built in sound server, sound will work in Gnome, too. No idea *why* it works, but it works. Go figure.

[bosox79]

jamez1988,

Congratulations, I am glad you were able to get sound working, not being able to listen to music while working on the computer can be a bummer