Trouble getting ALSA to work with nVidia nForce

[MrBlond83]

Greetings all,

I have more or less just finished installing gentoo for the first time. I'm really amazed about the ease of the installation, after reading so much about Gentoo in the two weeks previous to actually starting to install it, I saw many posts about people having difficiulties with it, not to mention the posts about installation taking 7 days and what not. Well, I went ahead and read the guides on gentoo-wiki, installed it on Reiser4 from Stage 1, and I think it took me about one day total until I had Xorg and KDE installed. So, it was a pleasant suprise to see that.

The one thing I cannot seem to get to work is sound. I have an Asus A7N8X-E Deluxe motherboard, with nVidia nForce2 soundstorm onboard audio. The sound has been working perfectly when I was using Ubuntu, so I have no doubt that it is supported in linux and should work. In Ubuntu, it also gave me two sound addresses, 0,0 for regular audio and 0,1 for IEC958, which was very nice to have.

But now, I can't get it to work. I have followed this guide to the letter:
[url]http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_ALSA_Complete_(includes_dmix)[/url]

Until the dmix part, and everything worked as it should, i did not get a single error message. After finishing that, KDE arts also stopped the alert I had when logging in, so I figured it should be working. However, my happyness was premature, as the Control Center's "test sound" is not working, and neither is mpg123. mpg123 pretends to play the selected file and yields no error message, but there is still no sound. I have also used alsamixer to unmute everything, and saved the settings, but still the same happens.

The kernel module I installed is intel8x0, as suggested by the ALSA Matrix for nvidia cards.

Any idea as to what I'm doing wrong? Here is my /etc/modules.d/alsa :

[Headrush]

I'm not explicitly familiar with that motherboard, but I maybe I can help a bit.

I recently tested the onboard audio chip on my motherboard and like yours it was suppose to be the intel8x0 sound module.
Unfortunately, although all documentation said this was the correct driver, it turned out it wasn't although it loaded fine and showed no errors.

I would suggest if you still have the Ubuntu CD, boot off it and see what module it is loaded and any messages in dmesg.

[salmonix]

Similar happened to my nForce3 card.
The kernel driver is working.
What U should try:

Download the latest alsla lib, install it and run it.
It seems that it does not matter if the support is module or built in kernel.
Of course alsa must be restarted and reconfigured.
For me that worked.

(see http://www.vectorlinux.com/forum2/index.php?topic=454.0 for details in my case.)
_________________
Quis custodiet ipsos, custodes?

[MrBlond83]

The plot thickens. Here is the lsmod output when running from Ubuntu 6.06.1 CD (I verified sound was working there):