Oh, NO! Not that same "No Sound" question again...

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To: debian-user@lists.debian.org
Date: Mon, 08 Nov 2004 14:08:10 -0800

Yeah, that same "No Sound" question again. But I can't find
an answer that's gotten my sound working anywhere, so I'll give
this list a try.

I have an Intel 82820 (Camino 2) chipset and a stable Woody.
I've installed the "i810_audio" driver (via "/etc/modules").
"lspci" output looks OK. both "/dev/audio" and "/dev/dsp" are
there. I don't see any sound-related (at least to my ability
to determine) error messages in the log files. Sound works OK
in Windoze. I don't get any sound when I "cat" a ".wav" or
".au" file to either "/dev/audio" or "/dev/dsp". I've tried both
"kmix" and "aumix", to make sure sound isn't muted,and neither
makes any difference.

I have not "Tried" the ALSA drivers. I don't like "Trying" things
to see if they work - I like DEBUGGING things. (I'm a little testy
about that because of all the random flailing I've been reading about
on the net, by people trying anything and everything to get their
sound working.)

Questions:

(1) Does anyone know how to get this particularly configuration to
work? I.e., if there is anyone who has had success with this exact
configuration, please tell me what I'm missing here.

More specifically,

(2) Is it possible that doing a "cat" of a sound file directly to
"/dev/audio" or "/dev/dsp" simply won't work, and that I need Yet
Another Driver ("/dev/mixer" or "/dev/sound", FI (neither of which
I have)) to make sound work with this setup? Should the "mixer"
utilities even have any effect when I try to "cat" a file directly
to the driver?

(2) Is there a patch or updated "i810_audio" driver for this chipset
(and if so, where should I have searched for it, since I've already
searched and haven't found anything)? (As a related issue, I'm not
sure how to determine the exact version of the driver I'm running
- I haven't seen it in "lsmod" or in the system log files, etc.,
but maybe I've missed it).

(3) Is there any *specific*, KNOWN reason to think that it is
*impossible* to get this combination working with the "i810_audio"
driver?

(4) Correspondingly, is it *known* to work with the ALSA drivers?

(5) Is there any solid reason to try compiling and installing the
"i810_audio" driver from source (I've been loading the "i810_audio.o"
out of the "/lib" tree; I'm assuming, however accurately, that it
corresponds to the source from which the kernel was built, since
I loaded it all off the Debian CD-ROMs)?

(6) I notice that OSS also *sells* drivers... is there any reason
to expect that whatever I might buy from them, can be expected to
work (or that it will be any simpler to deal with than the ALSA
installation, which looks like a convoluted mess)?

I've been at this for weeks, off and on, and have fixed any number of
problems along the way, but I still don't have sound, and I'm running
out of ideas (and websites to troll for information).

I'm not trying to bring up God's own sound mixing and recording system;
I just want things like Netscape plugins or whatever that happens to
want to output sound, to be able to output sound.

I'm somewhat mystified by all the suggestions to try this and try that
and see if it works, that I find on the net - I thought the advantage of
having an open-source environment was that it was possible to *identify*
what was going on, and that speculatively flailing around in every
direction was the provenance of the Gatesware droids. Am I missing
something
here? Do I need to become a specialist in sound system architectures
and
rewrite a driver in order to get sound working? (I'm well on the way to
becoming a network engineer just to get my LAN up, so why not, I
guess...)

Re: OSS - I'm curious about the relationship between the
apparently-OSS-based
driver I'm trying to use, and the "commercial" OSS drivers that are
available...
did somebody decide to try to make money off doing it right for a
change, or
something?

Thanks in advance. I sincerely hope somebody has a very simple fix
and I end up feeling like a complete idiot for posting this; it
would be more than worth the humiliation, after all of the fruitless
effort I've expended.

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