I have been having a few problems getting cards with the above chip to work successfully under 6.4, and following on from two recent threads here 'Loading the Sound Module' and 'Turning on the Sound' I am throwing in my experience in the hopes that one of you can point me to some obvious mistake I am making :) Apologies for the length of this but I wanted to summarise what has happened so far. Being very dependent on VR software sound is somewhat important to me... (Hence trying to cross mail to the ViaVoice Linux list as there may be useful overlap). It does also limit me a bit in searching so I may well have missed something obvious but hopefully then others will benefit from it! I am new to SuSE/rpm/yast - previously ageing Slackware for Linux but with a Unix background. I have 6.4 with the supplied kernel. Like Paul Abrahams I was getting no sound at all and tried modprobe with the following results:
modprobe es1371 /lib/modules/2.2.15/misc/es1371.o: init_module: Device or resource busy
and sure enough as Jon suggested lsmod revealed that the module was in place. lspci gives: 00:0c.0 Multimedia audio controller: Ensoniq ES1371 [AudioPCI-97] (rev 06) (my kids' machines have the same chip, revision 08, so this affects three machines at the moment) I also get: 'snd: card is out of range (0-0)' from dmesg after booting. I had also already found reference Jon's advice to: "Reboot your machine with the SuSE kernel, and *comment* these three lines in /etc/modules.conf: alias char-major-14 off alias sound off alias midi off Then uncomment these lines in the same file: # alias char-major-14 es1370 # options es1370 joystick=1 " and done this complete with a depmod -a. Jon also said: "After that, your modules will load on-demand. If you're paranoid, add a line like so to /sbin/init.d/boot.local:modprobe es1370" but in fact I find a reboot seems to 'lose' the added modules so I guess I need to be more paranoid? :) I then became slightly suspicious as although the ViaVoice for Linux set up failed at the microphone stage, I found that leaving KDE for other windowmanagers I could get the sound effects etc coming out. (eg all those whizz bangs in enlightenment...) I went back to KDE and found that I could get the KDE cd player to work and also I could record files using Krecord. But the alternative cd player didn't work and nor would the ViaVoice set up (which requires microphone input). Microphone and card work fine for ViaVoice under Windows btw so I have no reason to suspect technical problems with the mike/socket. I also found reference to amending the /etc/startkde file for kaudioserve which I tried but it seemed to make no difference and presumably should not impact the sound functions under other windowmanagers? (I tried ctwm, wm, fvwm2, enlightenment - same results every time) So then I tried testing the sound from console mode using the following tests: dd bs=8k count=4 /tmp/test.au cat /tmp/test.au > /dev/audio and found no output despite getting sound effects from various WMs. However something didn't seem right so I reran it through loudspeakers at top volume and this time did get some output so I figured that volume was the problem (I use headphones typically for this type of thing). I found a module called 'soundlow' which apparently is not loaded automatically, modprobed it along with 'sound' which also seemed to be missing, did a depmod -a and miraculously everything worked. The ViaVoice engine gave me a recording quality of 'excellent' several times successively and I was exceedingly happy because I need some of this stuff for work. (apart from anything else the SDK is still free for linux users <g>) Then I had to go into Windows (dual boot machine), came back to linux and suddenly was back to square one. The modules I loaded had gone - ok so I reloaded them, did the depmod -a, checked that /etc/modules.conf still had the ammendments in, but no joy. I now cannot get ViaVoice to work again, nor get any proper output from /dev/audio tests. I figure this has to be sound volume related somehow - krecord *still* works fine, the /dev/audio test still gives unusable volume. Presumably the ViaVoice engine is working at the level of /dev/audio. Right now I would really love someone to point me to my obvious mistake - I am quite sure I have missed something silly but haven't pinned down just what it is. The mail lists, hardware databases and newsgroups seem littered with people using es1371 with various distributions (which is one of the reasons I got those cards for the kids' machines), including some here using 6.4/other levels. Is it worth me switching to Alsa? But the really frustrating thing is that I *did* have it working briefly and that reboot obviously reset something I had gotten right in the configuration but I have no idea as to what it is - I noted all the changes I had made and have worked back through them. Or so I thought... Otherwise has anyone managed to get emacs for windows and the Cygwin Unix tools for windows working with a voice interface? <g> regards -- Karen Hunter-Jones karen@lspace.org -- To unsubscribe send e-mail to suse-linux-e-unsubscribe@suse.com For additional commands send e-mail to suse-linux-e-help@suse.com Also check the FAQ at http://www.suse.com/Support/Doku/FAQ/