[H-GEN] Sound card problems...

[Tony Nugent]

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On Wed Mar 19 2003 at 23:46, Shane Ravenn wrote:

> Heya folks. Got a wacky problem here that I hope someone can help me
> with.
> 
> I bought a sound card today, and I was looking forward to getting some
> multi-media back to my system again. I installed it, and then went on to
> try and get the software to configure it and use it. Hooboy!

[ ... ]

> OK, now for the card details:
>   Cobra AW-840 (C-Media CMI8738) AOpen PCI

> Anyone able to help me with this? I'd like to get this card working.

Have a look at the ALSA drivers (Advanced Linux Sound
Architecture)... browse through the docs, then compile and install
them.  There are kernel drivers, libraries and apps; the drivers are
a big compile and need to have the sources available for your
running kernel.  The driver files slot in beside the kernel's
standard oss drivers in /lib/modules/, and you configure the use of
what you want from /etc/modules.conf (and /etc/asound.conf for alsa
itself).  The alsa utilities (such as the mixer) give you access to
just about every functionality that your card is capable of.  If you
have more than one soundcard, then there are ways of "binding" them
together in ways similar to treating them as a single virtual device
(or any number of device "aliases" with each one doing different
things).

It's all very cool, and all in the docs:
	http://www.alsa-project.org/alsa-doc/

It does support for your c-media cmi8738 chipset:
	http://www.alsa-project.org/alsa-doc/doc-php/template.php3?company=C-Media&card=CMI8738&chip=CMI8738&module=cmipci

For my redhat boxes, I tend to use the alsa src.rpms that make it to
freshrpms.net and recompile the binaries from the .spec file - a new
set of alsa drivers needs to be generated each time the kernel gets
updated.

I'm not sure if .deb files are available anywhere, but you can get
the sources from various mirrors, see:
	http://www.alsa-project.org/download.php3

I've been using the ALSA drivers for over a year, and it makes my
sblive card rock!  My m'board also has an onboard VIA soundchip, and
I can also enable that and use either device as I want (but I don't
have enough speakers! :)  IIRC, there was mention that ALSA will be
in the 2.6.x kernels.

> Shane Ravenn

Cheers
Tony

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