sound card and driver on RH 7.1 laptop



I'd like to start working with sound on my Dell Latitude CsX laptop
running RedHat 7.1 Linux. I'm pretty clueless. All I really know is that
several years ago, when it was running RH 6, I had installed Csound and
was producing some sounds with it, but I don't remember any details of
how the sound was actually produced, except that I think I might have
been using the resident xmms and some driver that was a demo, maybe oss,
which expired after a month. When I upgraded to RH 7.1, I completely
wiped the HD, so there are no traces of the earlier experiments with sound.

On the theory that I did use oss, I downloaded an OSS3D demo and installed
it. The install script says it succeded:
Installation completed!
Plugin installed to /home/allan/.xmms/Plugins/libxmoss3d.so
and I checked that it is really there. Then I ran:
[allan@localhost OSS]$ xmms /usr/share/sounds/gnibbles/laughter.wav
and got a popup window telling me to check for the following:
1. I have the correct output plugin selected
2. No other program is blocking the soundcard
3. My soundcard is configured properly

I don't know how to check these things. I also don't know how to find out
what sound card I have. I executed dmesg and didn't see anything about sound
cards. I also looked in /var/log/messages and found lots of occurrences
of lines such as these:
Feb 23 08:46:01 localhost modprobe: modprobe: Can't locate module sound-slot-0
Feb 23 08:46:01 localhost modprobe: modprobe: Can't locate module sound-service-0-0

I have no idea whether they are actually relevant, except for contaning the
word sound.

Apart from wanting to use xmms directly on sound files, I want to be able
to use plaympeg to play mpg files that might have sound tracks. Presently,
when I use plaympeg on mpg files such as:
http://www-staff.it.uts.edu.au/~don/vogmovies/balmm.mpg
it plays them but gives error messages such as:
mcop warning: user defined signal handler found for SIG_PIPE, overriding
Warning: Couldn't init SDL audio: No available audio device
Will ignore audio stream

This goes away if I run plaympeg with the --noaudio option.

Now, admittedly, the mpg file in question doesn't have any audio, but I don't
think that is the reason for the error message about audio. I think the
reason has something to do with the absence of a driver for the sound card.
In the hope of being able to make some sense out of the workings of plaympeg,
I downloaded some stuff from http://www.libsdl.org and am trying to read the
docs. Since they mention OpenGL, I should probably point out that I am not,
as far as I am aware (which is not very far) using OpenGL. I use the Gnome
desktop.

Since someone will inevitably tell me to upgrade either my operating system
or my hardware, I need to emphasize that neither is an option for me at this
time. All I know is that sound used to work on this machine and I think it
should still be possible to get it to work and probably all that is required
is to find old versions of the right drivers. I just don't know exactly what
to look for or where to look.
--
Ignorantly,
Allan Adler <ara@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
* Disclaimer: I am a guest and *not* a member of the MIT CSAIL. My actions and
* comments do not reflect in any way on MIT. Also, I am nowhere near Boston.
.

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