sound problem - lost in a maze of ignorance

[bigjohn]

Hi forum,

Firstly, please excuse my stupidity - I'm newish to this "choice lark" that gentoo offers.

So, my system is using the 2.6.5 kernel. I have a soundblaster live! 5.1 digital sound card.

The problem is a little strange. I can listen to music cd's with kmix. I can listen to streaming audio with xmms. I get the system sounds, but if I try to watch a flash cartoon/movie I get no sound.

I've spent a couple of hours on this to no avail. I started trying to emerge emu10k1, which is the driver the sound card normally uses, but I get told it's incompatible with a 2.6 kernel. I've followed the instructions about setting up ALSA in the gentoo doc's - the only difference this seems to have made is that I've learned how to set the xmms to use the alsa plugin so it plays the streaming radio from virgin.

As far as I can tell all the sound facilities should be working - but as I don't really have a clue what I'm doing (as a former "Mandrake monkey", I've had no option but to blindly follow the alsa install/config instructions, and any other hint's or tips that I've found in these forums).

Could anyone please tell me what I should look at next (or too start with really), and if you've any suggestions could you explain them in "monkey see, monkey do" language, because at the stage of learning i'm at, I don't follow half of what's said! (sorry)

regards

John
_________________
How to read manpages
rute users handbook
Take care with "emerge -U"

[bigjohn]

I found a thread that mentioned about flash sound problems with opera 7.1

It said something about the paths to the flash plugin, and having too many - there should only be 2, or words to that effect.

So all I did was (on a hit or miss basis), disable one of them and it seems to have worked - the flash vid's at

http://www.rathergood.com

Seem to be working fine now - oh and the "kitten's" section at rathergood.com is excellent

regards

John[/url]
_________________
How to read manpages
rute users handbook
Take care with "emerge -U"

[krinkle]

just so you knows, the reason it said it was "incompatible" is because with 2.4 series kernels, alsa is not part of the kernel. becuase alsa is so common place, they decided to put the alsa drivers inside the kernel. because it's a part of the kernel now, you don't need to install *alsa-driver* (you still need alsa-utils, etc) seperate from the kernel. i hope that made some sense... sound is confusing in linux at first =)

[bigjohn]

Thanks for that krinkle,

Sound in linux is even more confusing, when using gentoo, but having been used to mandrakes power packs - all the commercial goodies ready configured etc etc.

But at least I got there - eventually.

regards

John
_________________
How to read manpages
rute users handbook
Take care with "emerge -U"