Finding the Right Sound Driver ...

[Darren Pilgrim]

[Redirected from -newbies.]

On Tue, October 26, 2004 12:50 pm, Siavash EDRISI said:
> Hi!
>
> I have been reading the text "Setting Up the Sound Card" at
>
> http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/sound-setup.html
>
> in order to find and install the right driver for the sound card in my
> i386. The hardware is an ESS 1869 PCI. Before I had WinXP installed on
> this hardware and it reported that the location of the card is: PCI
> slot 3 (PCI bus 0, device 14, function 0)
>
> I did whatever is described in the section 7.2.1 of the manual:
>
> 1- I checked the entries in "/boot/defaults/loader.conf". The right line
> was
>   snd_sbc_load="NO"
> I imagine this means that the driver is already somewhere on the harddisk!

It means the kernel will not attempt to load the snd_sbc module at boot.

> 2- Then I inserted the following line into /boot/loader.conf
>   snd_sbc_load="YES"
>
> 3- I booted the system.
>
> Right after calling "startx" and entering KDE I got (as usual) the error
> message that the sound server could not find the file /dev/dsp.

This may be due to a number of reasons.  Among them are the snd_sbc driver
not being the right driver for your hardware and KDE/X not being
configured with the correct device.

The first step is to provide copies of the outputs of the commands `uname
-a`, `dmesg` and `kldstat`.

Did you first try loading snd.ko (4.x) or snd_driver.ko (5.x) and see
which driver finds your hardware?

> As I read in the manual configuring a custom kernel with sound support is
> just a second method and can be used alternatively. So I am not sure if I
> really have to do something in the kernel or not, since the first efforts
> did not help!

Typically you don't need to recompile the kernel just to add something
like a sound driver.  Loading the module works just fine.  Just to be
sure, please provide a copy of your kernel configuration file so it can be
checked.

> Could someone please tell me what I still have to do?

Send a reply with the requested, necessary information.