Realtek 7.1 surround and suse 9.3

[leonpmu]

I recently upgraded my machine to an AMD Athlon64 3800+ with an MSI neo2 motherboard and an ATI X550 256MB DDR PCI-X graphics card.

The problem is with my onboard sound. It is a Realtek HD audio rig that is 7.1. I downloaded the drivers from the realtek website (can't download the latest ones, seems like all of their mirrors are permanently down at the moment.) I compiled them and set it up on alsconf, like it automatically does. My volume icon is fine no red cross on it, but from Amarok I don't get any sound, it "plays" fine ie I can see the graphical output showing up but no sound. The weird thing is, that when I fired up my tux pinball, I get all the sound effects crystal clear, including the background music... :confused:

Any ideas??

TIA

Leon

[bwkaz]

Onboard sound? Perhaps it can't "serve" more than one device at a time (i.e. it doesn't do hardware mixing).

What sound output is that "tux pinball" program using? What about Amarok? If the working program is using arts or ESD, and the non-working program is using raw Alsa or OSS (or the other software mixer program), then that might be it.

Also, why did you try to get the manufacturer drivers? Alsa is invariably better, when an Alsa driver exists for your hardware. The mfr. drivers are almost always nothing more than an enormous binary blob that barely works, and they call that "support".

Finally, did you mean PCI-X (64-bit PCI for servers) or PCIe (PCI Express)? Not that it matters for your sound issue, though. ;)

[leonpmu]

Thanks for your reply, I will try and respond to your qustions in order..
AFAIK Tux Pinball uses ALSA. Amarok is conf'ed with Arts, as I have always used that setting up until now, as it gives me the crossfader effect, also Amaraok wouldn't try and "play" the file if the engine is useless.. There are no built-in drivers for the sound card, some people managed to use the intel-snd module but it refused to load, so I got the ones directly from Realtek...My experience is that realtek are actually pretty good on their drivers for Linux... PCI-Express, sorry got lazy on that one ;)

[bwkaz]

AFAIK Tux Pinball uses ALSA. Just before you start up that process, does any other process have /dev/snd/pcmC0D0p open? (That's the Alsa device for the first card, first device, the playback module.) You should be able to use lsof or fuser to find out, or you could "ls -l" every process's fd symlink in /proc (/proc/[0-9]*/fd/*) and grep for the string "pcm". You'll probably need to be root to do that, though.

also Amaraok wouldn't try and "play" the file if the engine is useless.. Well, here's my question then: How would it know the useful-ness of "the engine" (whatever you mean by that) beforehand? ;)

If the driver just hangs when a second process tries to open it, then maybe the problem is that amarok is talking to artsd, but artsd is hanging trying to send the sound out to the card.

Or actually, maybe artsd isn't working for some other reason. What I'm just realizing is, if Amarok is talking to Yet Another Mixer Program, maybe that program has something wrong with it. (Is it running? I'd expect so, but you never know... Do other arts-using programs work?)

[leonpmu]

Well, all of my games give me sounds, GL117, lbreakout, frozen bubble...

This is a bugger, also seems like there is no microphone support in this driver either... *sigh*

[leonpmu]

I tried to run artsd manually this what I got :

artsd
ALSA lib confmisc.c:560:(snd_determine_driver) could not open control for card 0
ALSA lib conf.c:2686:(snd_config_hooks_call) function snd_config_hook_load_for_all_cards returned error: Permission denied
ALSA lib pcm.c:1959:(snd_pcm_open_conf) Invalid type for PCM default definition (id: default, value: cards.pcm.default)
Error while initializing the sound driver:
device: default can't be opened for playback (Invalid argument

[leonpmu]

wierd seems like a perissions thing, as root it runs fine, (after forcing artsd to start...) Apparently it won't allow me access to the sound device

[bwkaz]

What are the permissions on your sound devices (/dev/snd/*)? I'd assume they're readable and writable by the "sound" group, right? If so, make yourself a member of that group, log all the way out and back in, and see if it'll work.

[leonpmu]

Done that, no difference, I am guessing that it has to do with the realtek driver, maybe putting the device somewhere else...

[bwkaz]

Er, hold on, I don't think I understand what you meant by "it".

What, exactly, happens when artsd runs? It may help to try running artsd itself as root. But please be specific. :)

[leonpmu]

oops, my bad, I'll post the error message tomorrow, sorry mate...

Effectively artsd will start as rood, but gives a permissions error to the normal user about being able to access the device...

[bwkaz]

Well, if artsd doesn't start as your user, then that's likely the reason you can't use anything that tries to play through arts. If it isn't running, it's hard to have it work. ;)

Now as for how to fix it, I'm not so sure. If you have strace installed, you could try to strace artsd 2>~/artsd-error.txt and look in the artsd-error.txt file in your home directory. That will have a list of every system call the program made; most of the stuff at the start is useless, but you could search the file for EPERM -- that will be the return value of an open() call somewhere. Make sure the open() call is just before it does a write() call that ends up spitting out the "ALSA lib confmisc.c" error. (Or if not directly before it, very close.)

Look at what path it's trying to open, and check the permissions on that file.

Or just post the artsd-error.txt file; that might work too.