Todo: More work needed here (OSS is older technology and ALSA is preferred, even though since FC8 PulseAudio has replaced ALSA)
Created Friday 15/2/2008
This HOW-TO is for configuring sound card and related hardware in Linux. In more recent versions of Fedora, this process is trivial and is done during installation. The current version of Fedora (FC8 at the time of writing) uses Pulse Audio, which allows multiple applications to use the sound driver at the same time. When configuring sound in gnome, use the system-config-soundcard applet, which will detect any installed soundcards and other sound hardware. This applet must be run as a privileged user and requires the relevant sound modules to be already loaded.
The OSS driver (which is the older sound driver used) for the i8x0 series of cards is loaded with the i810_audio module. The alsa project (Advanced Linux Sound Architecture) replaced the OSS driver in linux years ago. However, the ALSA project has now too been replaced by PulseAudio (see #3)
Todo: More work needed here (OSS is older technology and ALSA is preferred, even though since FC8 PulseAudio has replaced ALSA)
See the ALSA Project documentation for information on the the ALSA driver and Intel i8x0 audio hardware. The ALSA Project and the ALSA driver, previously the preferred driver for sound management in Linux, has, since FC8, been replaced with PulseAudio (see #3). The ALSA drivers are loaded at startup by init.d scripts.
bash # /etc/init.d/alsa start
Use the same init.d script (/etc/init.d/alsa) to stop the ALSA and to remove the sound drivers from memory. The alsa init.d script saves the current ALSA settings and state (e.g., the PCM levels and other configuration settings):
bash # /etc/init.d/alsa stop
bash # lsmod | egrep '^snd'
bash # rmmod `lsmod | egrep '^snd' | awk '{print $1}'
Note: This section has been moved to pulseaudio
To load the sound driver for "Multimedia audio controller: Intel Corp. 82801EB/ER (ICH5/ICH5R) AC'97 Audio Controller (rev 02)" (which is output of lspci, use the "snd-intel8x0" alsa driver (e.g., /sbin/modprobe snd-intel8x0)
Fedora Core uses /etc/modprobe.conf to load modules at boot. To load the sound driver, identify the module required by the installed sound cared (e.g., Intel 82801EB requires snd-intel8x0) and then add an "alias" entry for "snd-card-0" to this module, e.g.,
alias snd-card-0 snd-intel8x0
For some reason, the mixer settings for PCM and PCM2 are set to 0 when the sound driver is loaded. Use "xaumix" to set these values.
The sound mixer has 3 settings that control volume. "PCM", "PCM2" and "Master Volume". The highest decibel-age can be achived through xmms by using the Enlightenment Sound Driver "eSound" driver (libesdout.o) and using the following xmms settings:
Stuart Moorfoot © 15 February 2008 foo@bund.com.au