[vox-tech] Help please with alsa sound and Gentoooolalaolalaoooooolala

[Richard Ely]

I have a new Gentoo installation as the result of 2.4 days of work with 
Jonathan.  We are down to some fun things: sound for example. Listen to my 
new mantra, "Compiling is good for you. Gentooooo Ohmmmmmmmmmm".

Sound problems are severe.      Hardware is fine as sound is OK in 
WinDoz.  It has worked well once in latest Gentooo when Jonathan was over 
here.  Now, he's gone and silence prevails.

We have alsa drivers installed. Computer is a 2.8 GHz P4 with an SOYO MOBO 
with an onboard AC97 Codec.

Occasionally,  but not consistently, nor often.  I can get the KDE arrival 
noise to work. Loud.

Occasionally,  but not consistently, nor often.  I can get the error noises 
when I crash into margins and things in Word Perfect to work.

Occasionally,  I can see Realplayer 8 playing the sound from a .ram feed in 
both Konquerer and Mozilla , but not consistently, nor often. Real player 
easily an consistently gets the header parts of the Real sound feed, but it 
doesn't flip over to the sound decoding on the second part.  The sound is 
downloading fine.  Real may be handling it, but nada comes out.

Does anyone understand Alsa?  How can I be sure I have the correct driver 
for a AC97 board? What are my alternatives?  I have most every box in KMIX 
checked, no muting, and every bar up. Same in the ALSA mixer, except the 
mix and mono buttons are not checked.

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks, DIck ELy