Setting Up Sound
9 May 2006Since I had installed Debian sound hadn't been working. Every now and then a dialog box would pop up saying something about sound, but I had been ignoring until I had more time to explore what was wrong. Yesterday, I deciided to see if I could get sound to work on my Linux box.
My initial research indicated that the best way to get sound was to use ALSA (Advanced Linux Sound Architecture). I checked Kpackage to see what was installed on my system and saw that some of the basic ALSA packages were already installed. I also saw a package that wasn't installed whose description said it was only needed for kernels before 2-4.*. I mistakenly thought that I had a 2.6 kernel so figured that I didn't need that package. (More on that later.)
The first thing I did was determine exactly which sound card I had on my system. I had the info from what I had found using Windows, but I also wanted to find out how to get that kind of info using Linux. Turns out the command lspci will do that. For my sound card, it listed "Multimedia audio controller: Aureal Semiconductor Vortex 1 (rev 02)." I wanted the Linux terminology because I've discovered that sometimes there is a difference and I was about to go searching for a sound card driver. The ALSA Project has a web site that is very comprehensive. The site has a link to a driver database and I was able to determine that my sound card was supported. Following this quick install guide , I started to see if I could install the driver for my sound card. It was during this process, when some of the commands didn't work, that I finally figured out that I didn't have the 2.6 kernel, but rather a 2.4 kernel.
This revelation took me back to Kpackage to install the ALSA package whose description said it ws needed on Linux installs before the 2.6 kernel. The package, ALSA-Modules-2.4.27-3-686, installed with no problems. Once it was successfully installed, however, I didn't know what to do. This is another one of those 'Linux things' that drives Windows converts crazy. Something gets installed but there is no indication of what happened, no desktop icons installed, nothing added to menus, etc. I reverted to the most logical step - reboot.
Rebooting was exactly the right step in this case. After signing in, when the KDE splash screen was displayed, a beautiful (at least to my ears at the time) sound played. And that was it. Sound was now working. The only other point I want to make is that my CD drive is not mounting automatically. I know this because once the sound was working on my Linux box, I immediately tried XMMS, the media player. At first, it didn't want to access the CD drive. I opened Konqueror to see if I could access the drive and list the files on the CD. When I did that, the drive mounted and all was well with XMMS.
So, I need to work on auto-mounting drives — CD, various hard drive partitions, shared network drives, etc — on boot up. But before I do that I want to figure out how to get read/write access to my NTFS partitions.
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