Re: sound card problem

Ray Olszewski
2005-04-21T02:02:49Z

ymc014 wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I had just installed Red Hat 9 but I have a problem with my
> soundcard,it does not recognize the Creative SoundBlaster in my hardware, I
> tried looking at the creative website for a driver suitable for linux
> unfortunately I didn't find any. So am I hopeless here?I wouldn't want to go
> back to XP but if I cannot use my soundcard I do not have any other option.
> Thanks.

There are many different cards whose names begin with "Creative
SoundBlaster", and most, if not all, are supported by recent (2.4.x and
2.6.x) Linux kernels. Typically they will use (on 2.4.x, anyway) the
SBLive module.

First thing to do is see if "modprobe sb" does anything useful.

Second thing is to run "lspci -vv" and check the section for the
"Multimedia audio controller". If there is not one ... might you have an
old, ISA-bus sound card (I doubt it, since you mention XT as the
alternate OS)?

Third thing to do is wonder if you have a PnP problem. I'm not sure what
default Red Hat kernels do here, but the usual solution in Linux is to
let the BIOS handle PnP (that is, in the BIOS setup screens, wherever it
asks about "PnP OS", say No so the BIOS will know to set up IRQs ans IO
ports.

(Do both the above things as root.)

Creative does (or did) provide some drivers, but I think the kernel
drivers these days handle most, if not all, SoundBlaster cards.
Certainly the info at http://opensource.creative.com/soundcard.html
seems to say this is so. They do mention there that some more recent
cards require the ALSA drivers, which RH may not try by default (not
being a Red Hat user, I'm not sure what it autoprobes).

Beyond this ... we can probably be of more help to you, but not until
you tell us more about the hardware ... a general description of the
system (especially if it actually has sound on the mobo) and the info
the lspci command I mention above reports about the audio subsystem. If
you do post again with these details, please also include the output of

lsmod
more /proc/interrupts
more /proc/ioports
uname -a

Your final recourse (other than XT) is, of course, to replace the sound
card with one that is supported. Here in the USA, that's a pretty cheap
solution (around $30, usually little enough money to spend for the
opportunity to run Linux). I don't know if prices in Japan are similarly
modest, though.

BTW, these days Red Hat 9 is not current version of Linux. If you prefer
REd Hat to the other distros, you probably want to move to Fedora (see
http://www.redhat.com/apps/download/ to get started with this). But this
is probably not related to your problem.