Onboard sondcard

[Mintnewbie]

I have an onboard soundcard (yeah it's not perfect, but it'll have to do for now) and found out that there's linux drivers on the installation cd for the motherboard. Can I get the onboard card to work in mint? and how? it's an M2N motherboard from ASUS. Should I use the drivers on the cd, and if so, can anyone tell my how to do so?

[Husse]

Do you have sound now?
The on board may be supported "by default"
As for how to install the Linux driver on the CD it depends on what there is
is it a tarball or better a .deb package
If in a tarball alien can be used to convert it to .deb
So check the CD and post back

[Mintnewbie]

I think, according to the filelist on the cd it's for fedora core 3. Anyways its a ALSA driver. this is its name: alsa-driver-1.0.12cl.tar.bz2

I have no sound at the moment and tried the "sound" option. But I can't get no sound, nor in the music player amarok.

[Mintnewbie]

can I use it, and how do I use it then?

[Raletia]

I'm a newbie to Linux too... however... after my experiences with my own sound card... I can say that file defiantly looks like source for the Alsa Driver, which means you'll have to do some compiling and stuff... which is kind of painful.. especially because some things needed to compile stuff dont seem to be installed by default. In my case with mint 3.1 is was build-essentials and libncurses5-dev if memory serves and I spelt them right.

Anywho.. I tried to do a lookup for your motherboard, there seems to be several types though by Asus that have M2N in the name. From my looking it seems you have a SoundMAX ADI 1988 or similiar. And from the SoundMAX FAQ ( Reference ) The driver for it in Linux is in the Alsa stuff... which means as far as I can tell it should already work, that or you'll have to download the newest alsa stuff and compile it from source, if there is another option I wouldn't know.

The Alsa homepage is: http://www.alsa-project.org/
And here is a quick install guide I found on there site: http://alsa.opensrc.org/index.php/Quick_Install

But note that some lines in those examples probably won't work for you card, like the "modprobe snd-ens1371" is for a different sound card.

I looked for yours in the list but I couldn't seem to find it.. that or I don't know what to look for.
Here is the list of modules though:
http://alsa.opensrc.org/index.php/ALSA_modules

[Mintnewbie]

Compiling... I think that's to advanced for me at this point. Linux is still totally new for me. I really appriciate it though, thanx for helping me out, I'll give it at go and see what happens. Worst case scenario: I still wont have any sound when I'm done :p But it wont be untill I know more about linux.

Thanx for looking it all up for me, it's nice to know that there's always help to get

[nick]

Hi

Try:

Comprehensive Sound Problem Solutions Guide:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=205449

Nick

[Mintnewbie]

I'm an IDIOT!!

You where right Raletia, it was supported allready and it works fine! If I just had used the "ALSA" from start, I wouldn't be asking everybody for help...

I'm really sorry, but it works now so I'm also happy Thanks again though, I really appreciate it

[Raletia]

I'm glad you got yours working. Wish I could say the same for my Sound Blaster 16 PCI

And, don't think your an Idiot... I can't count how many times I've had some kind of problem, computer wise or elsewhere, and spent so much time on it.. and then its like doh! I overlooked the thing I needed way back at the beginning.

Like when I spent a while looking for my glasses one time when I woke up, looked under the bed and everywhere, and it turns out there were right beside my pillow.

[Husse]

@ Raletia
So you're the guy (or girl ) that asked about a SB 16 in another post?
I've read it but yet not found a solution. It is a 16 bit hardware and this may be the problem

[Raletia]

I'm a guy(this is a nick I made up for a char on an rpg, and yes that char was a girl, thats why the name sounds as such, but its pretty unique so easier to use as my preferred nick of Firefly is usually taken).

Not sure if your thinking its the ISA version or not... but its the PCI version.

Based on the Ensoniq Audio PCI 1371 chipset/card/whatever.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_Blas ... ased_cards

[Mintnewbie]

It's good to know there's room for screwing things up, cause I think it wont be the last time p

The part with the glasses, yeah, I've done that too, it's scary to think how easy things get lost right in front of you

I hope you get your soundcard working, good luck with it

[Husse]

16 bit PCI - you wrote that

[Raletia]

16 bit PCI - you wrote that

Nope.. Never. I did a search of my posts and the word 'bit' only came up once as a reference to a frame of time. Besides.. afaik the phrase 16bit pci is rather a bit of an oxymoron As the pci bus has a 32bit bandwidth versus the 8 and 16 bit bandwidths of the ISA bus. Which there was a Sound Blaster 16 which was ISA, which is why I thought you might have gotten them confused, however on the PCI version it appears to be nothing more then aesthetics, as its actually rebranded Esnoniq cards which are completely unique from the card it appears to have been named after. Also please note I'm reffering to the hardware itself as the audio output does indeed appear to in some places be described as 16 bit quality, but this is not to be confused with 16-bit as in the old ISA type sound blaster cards. Mine is based on one of the rebranded es1373 chips, here is some info on the Ensoniq Cards, which are what the rebranded creative cards like mine are, ( Reference ).

I apologize for the confusion, it can understandably be very easy the way they named this card, and obviously I wasn't clear enough, so I am sorry.

Also, in my testing... this problem seems to occur in every version of mint and ubuntu I have tried, which as of yet has been from most current down to the 6.06 versions and those based on it(including the mint ones based off it[as far as I can tell]), I have yet to test with other versions, nor other distributions.

[Husse]

Oh - never?
Odd - but the mind can play tricks on you.
Some old soundcards (among them soundblaster 16) run on the PCI bus but actually never use more than 16 bit audio which is something else than a 32 bit bus (as PCI)
And thinking of it - these are ensoniq and I remember now having a hell to get one of these working under Windows (probably 95, but could be 98 )
I'll get back to you in that thread if I find a solution
I found an old page that claimed that you could use the 1371 driver
http://www.corbac.com/page18.html
Don't know if this helps...

[Raletia]

Kind of funny that we're taking over this thread, lol, and it happened so fast too... just realized it.

But to answer your question(s), Well, for the first one which you semi-asked when you mentioned trying to get it working in 95/98 - This card was manufactured in 1999 and purchased in 2000, if that give you a time frame. Its actually one of the last ones as creative even stopped marking the chips with the es1373 and marked them CT5880 - but it is apperantly the exact same chip, and the Alsa module page lists the CT5880 as being under the same module as the others(snd-esn1371) ( Reference )

Alsa appears to have automatically loaded that driver already, and it appears to be at least partially working, but(I still need to reboot back into mint and take screens of this too..) the mixer is missing controls, it appears to have all the recording and auxiliary controls but only has 2 playback controls, one is 3D Center and the other is 3D Depth, neither of which have any effect on volume of output as when unmuted and fully turned up it doesn't change the fact that there is no sound. Also both these controls are listed as mono output, however I don't think their output of any kind as in windows there are very similar named advanced controls, but one is a checkbox and the other is a slider that seems to add a stereo surround sound type of effect.

And there is no controls anywhere whatsoever listed that should be there, like PCM or similar output sliders. So as far as I can tell the problem could be as simple as it not showing the right sliders(and they are not listed in the ones you can turn on) and therefore having no way to unmute/turn up the volume, or what I think is more likely, is that for some reason it is not detecting the existence of those output channels at all. It certainly appears to be capable of recording(though I have not tested that yet) but its like someone removed all the output abilities.

Also on a side note... it seems that the box is the only place they named it the Sound Blaster 16 as even the windows drivers that came with it call it a 'Sound Blaster PCI 128', and the newer windows xp driver calls it, as I mentioned before, 'Creative AudioPCI (ES1371, ES1373 WDM)'.

[Husse]

Well, well - you've got even worse crap than I first thought
(Pleas don't take it personal )
These PCI128 with ensoniq also gave problems....
I'll have to talk to my son about this because we had the company together and tried to solve the problems together
As for that I thought you wrote 16 bit PCI, well I know so well that the Ensoniq appeared in PCI - they were never ISA to my knowledge - so I thought you wrote PCI

[Raletia]

So does that mean I don't have much luck? I'd really hate to have to remove my sound card, and turn on the onboard one in bios every time I wanted to boot into Linux... and vise versa to boot into windows, it would probably just end up in me staying in windows all the time.

It just really stinks because from my testing with wine(which somehow isn't working the same on the release v3.1 as it was on the beta 21 of 3.1) I would be able to run most everything... including my games- except for a few like battlefield 2 and 2142 and the like. I was getting all set to use it primarily. (I didn't have windows installed yet[I have recently formatted] when I did all this testing and so I ran into the problem when I did install it that the mic volume in windows was practically non-existent, and while it is ok in linux people told me I had a buzzing sound.)

[knot]

In your reference you point to the alsa page with an list of modules supporting differenent cards. By clicking on the references to the 16 bit card, it says that a module one could try is the snd-card-sb16 module?
btw, have you tried running alsa-conf? (if thats correctly spelled) to have it try and detect your card?

[Raletia]

As I've pointed out before, though it may be hard to notice when skimming, the card is not a sound blaster 16 as in 16-bit isa bus type, but rather a 32-bit pci bus based ensoniq card bought out and rebranded by creative. The autodetect didn't work properly which is why I asked for help. I even went to such lengthy measures(for me) as compiling alsa from source and all that. had no effect whatsoever.

My original post which ended up bleeding through in this thread, contains more details of the initial problem and whatnot. This is it: http://linuxmint.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=5764

Also... I ended up going back to windows for the time being because of that. However, now noticing the release of 4.0 which is now downloading via utorrent as I type this, and the fact I got a new(er) motherboard, proccessor, and ram, I may not have to deal with this issue anymore, the old motherboard, proccessor, and ram from my main machine will probably go to (slightly) upgrade my home server computer, which I probably won't be using that ensoniq card in it.

HOWEVER, that doesn't mean if someone knows or finds a solution that I would not wish to know it, or that if someone capable of finding and fixing a bug such as this wanted a test subject to that end that I wouldn't mind helping.