Ray wrote:

> Now I just need to see if I can get ALSA to detect this stupid Vibra16C
> plug and play card... (yes, it's an ISA card...) if not I know the sb
> drivers work for it and that'll be good enough - I mostly wanted to fix
> my "good" box and it was a bonus if ALSA would work with this old junker.

running alsaconf found it...

Ray wrote in <dOZYe.544514$s54.34294@pd7tw2no>:

> Mike Denhoff wrote:
>> On Fri, 23 Sep 2005 17:50:58 +0000, Ray wrote:
>>
>>
>>>oh... does this mean that by recompiling my kernel I broke ALSA and have
>>>to recompile it as well and that's why it's not working?
>>>
>>>would this be a shared library thing or kernel interface or ??? - I'm
>>>still confused how ALSA actually loads if it's not loaded in any rc
>>>scripts and not compiled into the kernel.
>>>
>>>Ray
>>>(trying to both fix the problem and understand how it all works at the
>>>same time.)
>>
>>
>> It is because the new kernel can't use the old modules. Slackware will
>> try to load the modules on start-up through the /etc/rc.d/rc.alsa script.
>> Read that and it will explain all.
>>
>> Mike
>
> I've looked in /etc/rc.d/rc.alsa and that's what's still confusing me...
> my broken machine has no /proc/asound and the modprobe -c returns
> nothing, so it does nothing... which is why I still was unsure
> What/Where ALSA was loading from.

The modules won't be found because they're stored in a version-dependent
dir, /lib/modules/`uname -r`
>
> What I think the problem is on the "broken" machines I need to run the
> install script from the alsa package to put libasound.so.* back into
> /usr/lib which is then "automatically" loaded by the kernel?

No, you need the modules in /lib/modules/linux-2.4.whatever , but if you
just copy the old ones they won't work. This is because Linus refuses to
have a stable ABI for the kernel and instead says that any kernel modules
have to be recompiled for each new version. IIRC the aim of this is to
prevent people releasing closed-source modules for the kernel.