Hello all,
I recently installed Fedora Core 2 test version on my Dell Inspiron 5000
laptop. This laptop has a ES1978 Maestro 2E sound card. Fedora seems to
detect the sound card fine; however it cannot seem to locate a module to
operate it. I was wondering if anyone else had encountered a simular
problem or knew of a hack/fix to solve this problem? I've run earlier
versions of RedHat on this box and never had a problem with sound before.
Thanks all,
AJ

Does it work at all under KDE/Gnome? Can you, like, open XMMS and it work? Try to go to a terminal and execute sndconfig and see if it will play that sound of Linus Torvalds announcing Linux as Linux. Doing that may even help fix your problem. If you just don't have sound for the KDE envirnoment, try to enable aRTs (or whatever audio manager applies, it's diferent for Gnome). It's somewhere under the Kontrol Center (System Settings sector), and is in a similar place under Gnome. If you got sound under Frozen Bubble (game), or a few other games, but not elsewhere, you have the same problem I have, and would like to know how to fix that. Me, I have a IBM Thinkpad 380XD (P2, 266MHz, 96MB Ram, NeoMagic video, not sure what kind of sound, but using SoundBlaster AWE 32 driver, aRTs doesn't respond, but Frozen Bubble works fine, Mandrake 9.2, will try another flavor since Mandrake development is crap). I am also a Linux Newbie though.

I've tried the RedHat sound configuration utility which is basically the graphical front end to sndconfig. This is the program that is seeing the soundcard, shows that it detects it but it apparently can't locate a driver and I can't hear the sample sound. Any other suggestions?

Couple tips, if you are using KDE...

Be sure to run KMix and set all the levels up as high as they'll go, and turn on all the inputs. You can play around with them more later, when you get the sound going.

Go into the Control Center / Sound & Multimedia / Sound System / Hardware, and try manually selecting the sound device. I had to set mine to ESD to get it working.

Well I'm not using KDE I'm using Gnome; however if worse comes to worse I guess I could try KDE. Are you using Fedora Core 2? And do you have the Maestro 2E card on a laptop? If the answer to one or both of these questions are in the affirmative and if you wouldn't mind running lsmod for me to see which sound module you have loaded. If I could figure out which sound module is being used I can load it manually. Thanks a lot!

Turn your sound up in the mixer. Try to use the alsamixer and see what happens. Does it act like it's playing but you don't hear a thing? Also try turning up your hardware speakers' volume dial (or turn them on, very common). Can you hear a CD or something if you hook it to the speakers?

What I would do is cat something to the speakers (such as: cat /dev/hda > /dev/dsp) then if it says that /dev/dsp does not exist you either have to load the module for your sound card or recompile your kernel.

If you ls'ed it, would that do the same thing?

lol - In my opinion catting one's hard drive is a rite of passage - And it is relevent to the question.

You do not even need to stop there you can cat your RAM by replacing /dev/hda with /dev/mem - Fun for the whole family!!!

Never mind, I tried it on one of my systems, and now I see why you prefer to cat it (and besides, they purr when you pet them! ).

i have a similar problem,
i had my card detected wrong by fedora core 1 and i had removed the old modules, installed alsa, but still i dont have the sound and it says that /dev/dsp does not exist and that i will use the null device instead ...
what shall i do now 'cos i'm not sure what shall i do now ... cos i dont know which modules to load and how

any help will be appreciated

--baronlynx--

That's what mine's doing. It usually wants 8-bit 25299 Hz sampling rate (or something like that), but it still doesn't rate when I specify that.

I know how to load modules, that's not my problem. I just need to know difinitively which module it's supposed to use. That's my problem at this point.

use /dev/audio1 in fedora with alsa I don't think you need to cat to /dev/dsp. But that could possibly work. Additionally you need the libs, drivers, and util installed. Since it is fedora there are several rpms floating about that will do this. I forgot where I got mine. Does fedora core 2 come with these? Anywhoo, make sure you follow the steps for your card at www.alsa-project.org . You have to do some of those steps. They might be already done though.

Is laptop sound a big toghie for Linux or something? Me and Firedude both are having trouble on laptop sound.