Sound broken by Synaptic. Anyone else? Any thoughts

[Ben Scott]

On 11/21/05, Bill Freeman <f at ke1g.mv.com> wrote:
>  As long as Ben is clarifying Debian...  (Not really, but one
> must heckle occasionally.)

  Only occasionally?  ;-)

> A suitable set of modules seems to be loaded, including
> sound_core, sound, snd, via82cxxx, and via82cxxx_audio.

  FWIW, on my Fedora 4 system running kernel 2.6.13 and ALSA 1.0.9b, I
have many more modules:

$ lsmod | awk '{ print $1 }' | egrep snd\|sound | xargs
snd_via82xx snd_ac97_codec snd_seq_dummy snd_seq_oss
snd_seq_midi_event snd_seq snd_pcm_oss snd_mixer_oss snd_pcm snd_timer
snd_page_alloc snd_mpu401_uart snd_rawmidi snd_seq_device snd
soundcore
$

> Various apps complain about the lack of /dev/dsp, and, indeed,
> it's not there.  (There is, however, /dev/dspW)

  I'm don't know/remember if Debian is using ALSA or "OSS classic". 
If it is ALSA, check the /proc/asound/ directory for information. 
That will tell you what bits and pieces are loaded and talking to each
other.  For example:

$ cat /proc/asound/pcm
00-00: VIA 82C686A/B rev50 : VIA 82C686A/B rev50 : playback 1 : capture 1
$ cat /proc/asound/card0/pcm0p/info
card: 0
device: 0
subdevice: 0
stream: PLAYBACK
id: VIA 82C686A/B rev50
name: VIA 82C686A/B rev50
subname: subdevice #0
class: 0
subclass: 0
subdevices_count: 1
subdevices_avail: 0
$

  You get the idea.

  OSS prolly ha[sd] similar things, but I honestly don't remember, and
don't have a system of that software vintage with sound hardware
available to check.

  Hope that helps,

-- Ben "Hecklee or heckler?" Scott