[ILUG] Sound under 2.6

[Michael Conry]

On Wed, 1 Dec 2004 19:54:02 +0000, Sarah Fortune <fortunes at tcd.ie> wrote:
> Hey,
>
> I can't get sound to work with my 2.6.9 kernel. I get:
>         sjf at deborah:~$ cat < /dev/dsp
>         -bash: /dev/dsp: No such device
>
> But clearly the device does exist:
>
>         sjf at deborah:~$ ls -al /dev/dsp
>         crw-rw----  1 root audio 14, 3 2004-07-09 01:08 /dev/dsp
That doesn't necessarily mean the device exists.  It just means you
have a device node in the /dev directory called dsp.
If /dev/dsp didn't exist, you'd get an error along the lines of:
bash: /dev/dsp: No such file or directory
If you use devfs or udev then the device nodes get created as
appropriate on a dynamic basis and the presence of a node can indeed
be an indication that the device is detected, and that the appropriate
driver code is present (compiled into kernel or module loaded).

>
> I have OSS and ens1371 support compiled in. Any idea what's wrong?
I'd infer from the error you get that the kernel is not correctly
configured for the card.  As a first point, I think you'd be better to
use Alsa rather than OSS as the OSS drivers are going to be phased out
in the future and in many cases the Alsa drivers offer better
performance.

Notwithstanding this, things to look at to find a solution:
- is the ens1371 support compiled into the kernel or compiled as a module?
- if it's compiled as a module, is the module loaded (modprobe ens1371)?
- if the modprobe fails, what error message occurs
- if the driver is compiled into the kernel, take a look at dmesg
output after booting to see if it generates any error messages.

Michael