You look at your PCI chip(s). Open up your case and look at the
set of chips on the board. (If it is onboard sound). Write down
the numbers of the large chips. You may recognize the chip in the
table in the Sound-HOWTO or Sound-playing-HOWTO If you google your board
probably the manufacturer says it is AC97 PCI/codec or something
similar. Several drivers use that, so learn more. It could be
via82cxxx_audio or other. OSS drivers will drive most sound cards and
on boards. AlSA is not always necesary.

When a sound card is not run by a mixer it is muted. You have to turn
off muting. You can sometimes do that from amixer with the unmute
command. KDE mixer controls should unmute the card. There are several
controls. Check them all. Gnome is a bit flakier.

modprobe can give info about driver options. (modprobe -p)? man modprobe
for more info.

It pays to recompile the kernel and work your way through sound modules.
Read carefully. Install sound support and the cards as modules. You may
have to explicitly load the card driver with modprobe. It may not
automatically load with kmod. cat /proc/modules to see if it loaded.

EC<:-}

Chris wrote:
> Hello members and nonmembers alike,
> I recently installed Slack 10 and one of the trouble spots is the sound.
> After some finagling I got a squeek of sound to come out of the speekers.
> I've checked them and they work fine. I ran alsaconf and the output
> matched that of lspci and other HW monitoring programs. I ran alsamixer,
> alsactrl, etc and raised the volume to max. I believe its a module issue,
> but I don't know what the configuration should be. I've looked at the
> gigabyte website and that is no help, ALSA doesn't have anything specific
> to my motherboard, modprobe only told me the parameters (as did ALSA) and
> their value ranges. Nothing told me were I could look to find what I
> needed to set the parameters to.
>
> Thank you,
> Chris