No sound in Red Hat 8.0

[newtek]

Running Red Hat 8.0 and I have not been able to get the sound to work at all. I'm using an MSI motherboard with on board AVance 97 sound. Is there a way to tell Red Hat what sound driver to use, if so how would I do it?:confused:

[jthomet]

May I suggest alsasound. It's fairly painless to set up, and it works like a champ. Download the current driver from alsa-project.org, and use
./configure
make
make install
to install it. Then, since you're on a redhat system, you'll want to go into the utils directory and run snddevices, followed by sndconfig (I might be wrong on the name of the second one, as I'm not AT my Linux box). This should scan for the device and modify the /etc/modules.conf accordingly.

After all this, you should be able to unmute your speakers using something like alsamixer. At this point, you should have sound. This should get ya started! ;) Have fun!

[newtek]

downloaded the alsasound and installed accordingly but when I go to open the sound mixer however the system says "I was not able to open your audio device. Please check to make sure you have permission to open /dev/mixer and make sure you have sound support compiled in you kernel.

I should have permission since I'm logged in as root and wouldn't REd Hat have sound support compiled?

If anyone has any ideas >????

[Musquo]

login as su
su -
root password:
and then type in kudzu

That should bring up the hardware autodetect and config tool. Also verify that pnp os is disabled in the BIOS

[sambrose]

I am also experiencing this problem - "I was not able to open your audio device. Please check to make sure you have permission to open /dev/mixer and make sure you have sound support compiled in you kernel."

I attemped to install the alsa drivers, but got lost at this step - run snddevices, followed by sndconfig (I might be wrong on the name of the second one, as I'm not AT my Linux box). This should scan for the device and modify the /etc/modules.conf accordingly.

snddevices ran OK. But I didn't know what sndconfig was.

Also, will it hurt anything to run the "make install" command more than once.

Please bear with me, I just got Red Hat installed last week and this is the first time ever using it.

[jthomet]

Sorry, guys: That "sndconfig" was my bad. After double-checking with my linux box, you want to go into the utils directory as in ./alsa-driver-0.9.0rc5/utils. In this directory, you want to execute alsaconf. This is a utility that will probe for your hardware and write out the appropriate information to the /etc/modules.conf file. Note: This script was desgned with a RedHat distribution in mind, so use it with caution.

Also, for those of you reporting the errors opening the audio device, you need to make sure that your kernel was compiled with basic sound support enabled. (You don't have to have your sound module compiled into the kernel; but you do need to have the basic sound option enabled.) If this isn't enabled, alsa can't work.

Hopefully, this clarification helps a bit. (I must've been on crack last night!) :D

[sambrose]

Thanks, jthomet. I followed your steps and installed alsa. Sound works fine now. But it seems I can't play mp3's in xmms. Any ideas there?

Thanks.

[sambrose]

Ah, never mind. I just did some research and found out the Red Hat didn't ship with mp3 support. I went to XMMS website and downloaded a mp3 plugin. Works like a charm now!

Thanks.

[newtek]

Glad to hear that someone got theirs to work. I still cannot get past running the 'configure' script. The message is:

loading cache ./config.cache
checking for gcc... no
checking for cc... no
configure: error: no acceptable cc found in $PATH

am I doing something wrong or what? Since this is'nt working I can't go any further.

[sambrose]

Ahh! I remember getting that error message as well. Try running configure as root, if you're not already.