alsa problems - realtek ALC 650

sdillon · n00b Joined: 01 Jan 2003 Posts: 8

Building gentoo from scratch on a brand new box:

I've installed alsa support oh, about 4 times now, wondering if I've missed something crucial. I can play a .wav sound using aplay, but cannot play a music cd using cdplay, xmms, cdplayer, or anything else for that matter. I've got a Shuttle SB51G that has the Intel 845GE chipset, including Realtek ALC 650 sound. I'm using the intel8x0 driver with alsa.

Help! I know I'm close, but...

Lucas · Posted: Wed Jan 01, 2003 4:31 am Post subject:

Are you using any sound deamon? (arts, esd).
Do you get any error messages?

El_Presidente_Pufferfish · Veteran Joined: 11 Jul 2002 Posts: 1179 Location: Seattle

Try using the via82xx module(in the new version) or the via8233(old version)
Thats what i used with my ACL650

Jowilly · Guru Joined: 22 Jun 2002 Posts: 319

Have you installed alsa-oss ?
And then enabled the oss modules in /etc/modules.d/alsa for oss compatibility ? (If you install it afterwards, you probably have to remerge alsa-driver...)
(look in the gentoo alsa how-to).

You have an intel chipset, intel8x0 should be your driver. I have a 845PE, works great.

For xmms, you can then also emerge the alsa-xmms-0.9 plugin (not the xmms-alsa-0.5 !).

sdillon · n00b Joined: 01 Jan 2003 Posts: 8

Thanks for all the suggestions, everybody. I should have included more information in my original post - sorry. Here goes:

No, I'm not using and sound daemons.
No, no error messages - but a few strange things described below.
Thanks for the suggestion, El Presidente, but I'm almost certain I should be using the intel8x0 driver - or perhaps an ac97 driver... but not the Via driver.
Yes, I've installed alsa-oss.
Yes, I've edited my /etc/modules.d/alsa to enable the oss modules for compatibility. After reading your suggestion, I then re-emerged alsa-driver just to be sure.
Yes, I've emerged alsa-xmms.

Now, some things that strike me as strange, that may be clues:

1. When my box reboots, the master and pcm is always muted. In other words, aplay on a .wav file appears to work without errors, but unless I use amixer to set Master and PCM, no volume. Seems like those settings should be retained from boot to boot.

2. Communication to the CD drive really is working. I can start x, fire up xmms, and hit the play button with an audio CD, and it all behaves as if it's playing. I can even plug my speakers into the CD headphone jack and hear the music. Just nothing through the system's speaker ports. My box has six channel sound, so it has three speaker ports. Don't get anything out of any of them.

3. On boot, for runlevel 3, I get a message saying "ALSA driver is already running." That seems odd. First, I thought there was only boot and default runlevels, not 1..6 as in something like RH. Most likely, I just don't understand Gentoo's rc scripts well enough. Nevertheless, it is obvious that an attempt is being made to start alsa twice.

4. "No state is present for card ICH" message in the boot messages. Not sure if this has anything to do with it or not.

5. I get a nasty segfault if I run /etc/runlevels/boot/alsasound restart, followed by "Device or resource busy" messages for snd-pcm, snd-timer, snd-mpu401-uart, snd-rawmidi, snd-seq-device, snd-ac97-codec,snd, followed by the "ALSA driver is already running" message.

So, any more ideas?

Thanks.

Jowilly · Guru Joined: 22 Jun 2002 Posts: 319

Apart from the CD, are other sounds playing ? if you play mp3 with xmms, do you hear sound ?

If so, have you checked the audio cable connecting your cdrom to the motherboard ?

SQLBoy · Guru Joined: 17 Aug 2002 Posts: 381

You should:

rc-update del alsasound

then

rc-update add alsasound boot

it seems you added it to the boot and default runlevel which is why you get that message its already running.

You might want to unmerge all of your alsa stuff, remove the alsa file from /etc/modules.d and then update-modules, reboot,then start over again following the directions on the gentoo site to the letter.

Most of the new boards out there with the AL650 actually have two sound cards. Normally, dsp0 will be the via82xx or the i180 depending on your chipset and the ALC650 will be the AC97 driver and will be dsp1, this is sometimes vice versa as well.
You can find more info about the ALC650 here:

http://www.realtek.com.tw/products/products1-2.aspx?modelid=30

The i810 is the right driver for the 845. Unforunately, the i180 driver, I think, is cursed. It suffers from being sucky. I have the same sound setup you do except I'm using an Nforce2 board. I wish I still had my alsa modules file. It took me about 2 days to worl it all out and in the end the sound was horrible. I ended up using the commerical driver from opensound.com.

sdillon · n00b Joined: 01 Jan 2003 Posts: 8

I've taken SQLBoy's advise and started over from scratch with alsa. I have followed the instructions to the letter. I chose the intel8x0 driver. When I got to the part where I manually start alsa (/etc/init.d/alsasound start), I received the following:

Starting sound driver: snd-intel-8x0 done
ERROR: alsactl not found

If I then lsmod, I *do* see all the snd related modules loaded.

What is alsactl? Should it have been included in the alsa emerge? I will stop at this step until I hear from somebody - I suspect this has been my problem.

Thank for all of you who have been so kind to respond. I really appreciate it.

SQLBoy · Guru Joined: 17 Aug 2002 Posts: 381

alsactl is part of alsa-utils I believe. did you emerge that? when alsa starts it loads the /etc/asound.state for your saved mixer settings and what not. If you didn't didn't asound.state then alsasound will try to execute the settings in there. try deleting asound.state.