major sound problem [somewhat-solved]

[xaos5]

I have two cards (one is considered onboard) the motherboard is an asus a7n266-e. I took out the first sound card I had in there (aopen aw850) and wanted to try out the other card which shares a slot with the last pci slot. Now here comes the problem, I boot up the computer everything seems fine, gets to gdm (runs perfect), once that trys to launch anything else (kde, enlightenment, failsafe terminal) they all won't load. They will sit on a gray screen for about 1 minute and reload gdm. I then tryed to go into runlevel 1 and it wouldn't give me the login prompt, so I hit cntrl+c for the hell of it and it popped up. I can't get into any desktop environment or get the login prompt thing without hitting cntrl+c

I have alsa built-in to the kernel (2.6.11-gentoo-r6)
the first soundcard is detected as cmipci audio driver and worked fine before the swap
the second soundcard is detected as nForce audio controller (like onboard)

I've tryed everything from no soundcards in, one soundcard in, and two soundcards in.

maybe there is a syslog file somewhere giving me the reason for this but I don't know how to get into it.

mod edit: deCAPITALized subject. Capitals are considered screaming. --Earthwings

[jbwillia]

I had similar problems with the soundcard in my laptop on the 2.6.11-gentoo-r6 kernel. What finally fixed mine was taking alsa support out of the kernel and emerging alsa-driver after recompiling the kernel. I then went ahead and ran alsaconf and it worked beautifully.
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[xaos5]

ok heres some more information - managed to get into kde by doing this:
gdm session type: failsafe terminal
after nothing comes up in terminal hit cntrl+c
bash-2.05b$ comes up
/usr/kde/3.3/bin/startkde will bring up kde


xmms will play audio on the aw850 card with sound output
xmms will play audio on the ACR sound card but with no sound output (no errors, no sound)

I pulled this off of the asus website
Thanks to the NVIDIA MCP-D southbridge and an ASUS ACR audio module, users can experience incredible Dolby 5.1 audio and S/PDIF-in/out connectivity to highest-quality speaker systems. The A7N266-E with Dolby audio support offers an onboard theatre-quality sound experience, with superior performance to most external sound cards.

[xaos5]

I guess I could try removing alsa in the kernel...

[jbwillia]

you will effectively get it back once you emerge alsa-driver... also, make sure you are starting alsasound:

[xaos5]

ok sweet got both sound cards working...
but I still have the problem of not being able to load anything.

I still have to go into failsafe terminal and hit cntrl+c then startkde, enlightenment, etc.
If I don't hit control+c in failsafe terminal it will still restart back to gdm.


ok heres what I get in runlevel 1

gentoo login: xaos
Password: ****
login(pam_unix)[7464]: session opened for user xaos by (uid=0)
Last Login: Sun Apr 24 16:11:40 on :0
(freezes here for about a minute)
login(pam_unix)[7464]: session closed for user xaos
(back to gentoo login:)

If I hit cntrl+c here before it closes it works fine. I have no clue what this is.

edit: root logon in init 1 works fine, but gdm still won't load anything as root either.

[jbwillia]

I don't know much about gdm ... I unmasked kdm in /etc/portage/package.keywords and it works great. However, considering login managers in general: does gdm have a dropdown box for selecting which session type you want? Another consideration: are you sure you're using gdm insead of xdm. If you don't change the DISPLAYMANAGER variable in /etc/rc.conf I believe xdm is the actual default which is pretty plain and has to be configured through text files as opposed to to using slectable dropdown boxes. Unconfigured, xdm acts similar to what you described.
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