Please help me with the alsa pain that I have

[saturn-vk]

Up until now I have only used the oss driver for my sblive card. it worked, but i noticed that If i set the volume on max, the sound gets distorted. up until now i have lived with it, but a lot of people are saying that alsa is the next big thing, so I finally decided to try it.

First of all, i went to the alsa project site and downloaded the alsa driver, lib, utils, and tools.
then I went here:
]alsa help for emu10k1 (http://www.alsa-project.org/alsa-doc/doc-php/template.php3?company=Creative+Labs&card=Soundblaster+Live+Value&chip=EMU10K1&module=emu10k1#aso)

I did everything up to the alsamixer part as they said, and I got no errors whatsoever. the modules loaded fine and all.
but it's the alsamixer part where I hit a dead end. When I try to run it, I get this:

alsamixer: function snd_ctl_open failed for default: No such file or directory


without the alsamixer program, the best thing I can get is muted sound.
please, if anyone knows something even remotely connected with this problem, don't hesitate to post.

[bwkaz]

Did you run the snddevices.sh script that's in the Alsa driver package?

Well, hang on, this only applies if you installed Alsa from source.

[GhostDawg]

Have you tried using KDE's kmixer to turn up the volume?

[saturn-vk]

Originally posted by bwkaz
Did you run the snddevices.sh script that's in the Alsa driver package?

Well, hang on, this only applies if you installed Alsa from source.

well, i didnt even notice that script before, however

alsamixer still doesn't work, however, now it's not as simple as the above problem, it spits out a complex segfault (like when a kernel hangs and it spits out all this weird stuff about incorrect addresses and such)
if i start kmix it gives me options for a card totally different from the sblive(and yes, I do have the snd-emu10k1 module loaded)

totally weird.

so what now? should i give up on alsa and go back to oss?

[je_fro]

Did you try this:

# insmod snd-mixer-oss
# insmod snd-pcm-oss
# amixer
# amixer set Master 100 unmute
# amixer set PCM 100 unmute

[anmaxp]

My guess is you failed to install one of the source packages (probably some libs are missing) try unloading the modules, and doing a make install (As root) on all the folders where you extracted the tarballs you donwloaded from alsa: alsa-driver-0.9.4, alsa-lib-0.9.4 and alsa-utils-0.9.4

Load the modules again and see what happens. I also have a SBLive! card and yes i am running alsa...

If this doesnt work try unloading the modules again, go into each of the alsa folders type 'make uninstall' and then start all over following the instructions u read for the emu10k1 on the alsa website (dont miss a single step)

by the way... did u unload the oss emu10k1 module before u loaded the alsa modules?

[bwkaz]

In addition to anmaxp's post, you can try a make mrproper in the alsa-driver directory, and a make distclean (I think -- if not distclean, then mrproper) in the others. Do this after you uninstall, and before trying to recompile the drivers.

Do this AFTER you do make uninstall, because "make distclean" or "make mrproper" WILL blow away the files you need to uninstall the package. :)

[saturn-vk]

as i said, i followed the insall procedure very carefully.

btw according to the install procedure, I wasn't supposed to run snddevices.

anyway, here's the error that i get from alsamixer:

ble to handle kernel NULL pointer dereference at virtual address 00000000
printing eip:
c0113ce3
*pde = 00000000
Oops: 0000
CPU: 0
EIP: 0010:[<c0113ce3>] Tainted: P
EFLAGS: 00010097
eax: dd0e0784 ebx: dd0e0784 ecx: 00000000 edx: 00000003
esi: dd0e0788 edi: 00000001 ebp: d240ff2c esp: d240ff14
ds: 0018 es: 0018 ss: 0018
Process alsamixer (pid: 18269, stackpage=d240f000)
Stack: cb437d80 d1492240 dd0e0600 dd0e0788 00000286 00000003 dd0e074c e08f1511
c3cebcc0 00000282 dd0e075c dbe87a80 dd0e075c dbe87a80 e08f2dcd dd0e0600
d1492240 00000000 dbe87aa0 dd0e075c d1492240 c3cebcc0 c158e300 d81514c0
Call Trace: [<e08f1511>] [<e08f2dcd>] [<c013382c>] [<c01327f5>] [<c0132843>]
[<c0108807>]

Code: 8b 01 85 45 fc 74 4c 31 c0 9c 5e fa c7 01 00 00 00 00 83 79
Segmentation fault

and yes, i have installed alsa-driver, lib and utils

[bwkaz]

Yeesh, your kernel is segfaulting...

Everything else works, right? So it's not extremely likely that this is due to iffy memory?

Hmm... which kernel is this? Which version of alsa?

You don't have to run snddevices if you use a kernel with devfs. But from the original post, it looked like the device files weren't there, so it was (I thought) a likely first shot.

[saturn-vk]

well, the only dev file i was missing was /dev/midi. the rest were there(otherwise the oss driver wouldn't have worked)
i'm using kernel 2.4.21 and alsa-driver-0.9.4

[bluesky]

What distro you are using? reason is installing alsa with rpm is not the same as w/o rpm; also some distros may be alsa ready which make the installation easier. Some such as crux which starts pretty much from scratch is much harder... :p

[saturn-vk]

check my avatar :)

[bwkaz]

Originally posted by saturn-vk
well, the only dev file i was missing was /dev/midi. the rest were there(otherwise the oss driver wouldn't have worked) Alsa uses separate device files from OSS. In my devfs setup, Alsa's device files are in /dev/snd, while OSS's are in /dev/sound. They're also named differently. Even if OSS worked, Alsa's devices may not have existed.

That kernel and Alsa driver shouldn't be broken... might it be worth installing alsa 0.5.12a once? I know that one works, at least with 2.4.20 (and I don't see any changes in 2.4.21 that would break it). That might cause more problems than it'd be worth, though... hmm. :-/