Soundcard Page

Nowadays, most distro's do a pretty good job of detecting and setting up sound cards, which is much nicer than it was several years ago, but there are still a couple of them out there that don't. On a recent Slackware 8 install, I had to jump through a couple of hoops that are uncommon that I thought some of you might want to know.

First of all, the common utility "sndconfig" is not on Slack8 so I had to manually setup my card. If your using a Red Hat or Debian based distro, this utility will probably be what you will want to use, but I'll go through the manual process in case anyone wants to know or needs to know how to.

First of all, you will need to find the appropiate driver/module for the card, you can find this on about any linux hardware site. Mine is a Sound Blaster Live, so I will need the "emu10k1" module, substitute yours where I use this module. Also, open a console box and enter "lsmod", if the result does *not* show the "soundcore" module, you will also need to load it as well.

Where the modules are loaded from on boot will be /etc/modules.conf or /etc/modules on every distro except Slackware which uses /etc/rc.d/rc.modules as the proper script. Open the appropiate scipt file with your text editor of choice and see if the module you need is in there and just commented out. If you find it commented out (with a "#" or ";"), simply remove the comment character, otherwise start a new line and enter:

/sbin/modprobe soundcore # if this module was not listed in "lsmod"
/sbin/modprobe emu10k1 #replace the module name with the one appropiate for your soundcard

Save the file and exit it.
The easiest way to get the changes take effect will be to reboot the box. On boot, you can note that the module(s) are loaded properly by watching the boot messages. When the boot is done, you should have sound! If not, use "lsmod" and "dmesg" to see if the modules are loaded and if the system gave any errors about loading the card on boot. ISA cards may need io= and irq= specific information, some PCI cards may have a conflict with the bus position which may require changing the slot on the motherboard, but that is beyond the scope of this howto. If your still having problems, check posts in a newsgroup covering your distro and if nothing is found regarding the problem, post to the board. The odds are someone can help you fix it and leave the information to help others later on down the line with the fix.

Hope this helps,
~Guitarlynn