so i'm running Fedora Core 6-x86_64 at home on my desktop, which has several sound cards installed on it (an integrated, a 4 channel Sound Blaster, and a Sound Blaster Live! 5.1).

my main sound card is the Sound Blaster Live! 5.1, which Fedora Core didn't have any problem initially detecting and defaulting to.

the problem came when i was messing around with the config files, trying to modify the way surround sound worked (so that the rear speakers would play, even with audio sources with less than 6 channels).

so somewhere in that process, i borked my ALSA installation. i really don't know how either... i had to manually create a .asoundrc file in my home directory, played with a bit, and when it wasn't working the way i wanted, deleted it. unfortunately after that my sound card stopped working entirely, even though ALSA is supposed to operate fine w/o a .asoundrc file.

now when i go into the sound config GUI's that came w/ FC6, it still detects my card, but there are no selectable PCM devices on that card, when there used to be about 4 different ones.

the best thing i could probably do would be to completely reset or reinstall alsa, however fedora core does not make this easy, as its completely integrated and is not recognized as an independent package. does anyone know how to do this, or possibly how to repair my ALSA configuration?

Everything *nix
!

ALSA is detected as package on my machine:
Maybe you removed ALSA by accident.
Try: alsamixer
from a terminal.

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i had assumed the alsa drivers were seperate from alsa-lib, as it seems on other distro's. particularly on other distro's (and earlier version of fedora), that alsa is considered its own service, which can be start/stopped/restarted like any other service on the machine, but fedora core does not use alsa this way.

here's the tricky part: i've realized that the sound card does actually sometimes work correctly upon boot and continues to operate normally, while other times it doesn't. it seems to be random at best, as this happens on its own without me changing anything at all.

things i've tried doing: upgrading kernel to 2.6.20-1.2948.fc6, upgrading alsa-lib to latest version in rawhide,
adding this:
to my etc/modprobe.conf,
and a hellva lot of googling.

here's a forum post about someone else who had a very similar problem, but their resolution did not work for me:
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...d.php?t=512411
this is somewhat similar:
http://www.fedoraforum.org/forum/pri...d.php?t=116444

here's the output of what versions of alsa* packages i have:
odd that there's two alsa-lib packages... maybe this is a result of upgrading to the rawhide versions?

i had attempted to upgrade the utils/tools as well, but there was a conflicting dependency involving ncurses that prevented those from being upgrade to rawhide as well...

Remove that alsa-libs package and reinstall it like this:
See if that fixes anything.

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negative.

after removing the two packages (which i had to use the --allmatches parm to rpm for it to work), i reinstalled alsa-lib, but this time i did not use the development version (as that didn't seem to fix it either).

rpm -qa alsa-lib* still lists two packages of the same version, but i realized that this is because i'm running the 64bit version of FC6, so by default it installs both the i386 and 64bit versions.

also tried erasing the alsa-utils and alsa-tools packages, and reinstalling those. didn't work.

anymore ideas? i appreciate your help so far

Add this above the install and remove lines in the /etc/modprobe.conf file:
This will require you to actually reboot the computer, so that all the module bindings are correct. If you have multiple sound cards, remove them or if they are onboard, disable them in the BIOS, and try the above suggestion. If it works, there is obviously a problem with the driver binding another device first, or some other error with ALSA choosing a different card as card0, the default mixer device.

Let me know the results so we can determine the exact problem.

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so far after implementing those lines in my /etc/modprob.conf (btw, the only line that wasn't already in there was "options snd-card-0 index=0"), and unplugging my webcam (which i'm beginning to think was the true cause of these problems), the sound has been working 3 out of 3 times...

it could still go awry, but 3/3 is the best i've gotten since install.

i still have my extra SB card and didn't disable my integrated sound card, but so far they aren't causing any problems.

the reason i think the webcam was the problem was because it has a built-in microphone in it, which ALSA was having a hard time interfacing with. for the times during which ALSA was not working, if i checked /proc/asound/cards, it would label index 0 as being some kind of USB-audio device.

once i'm sure that it is my webcam causing the problem (after having a few more successful reboots without it), i'll be glad to run some tests to help file a bug report so we can improve fedora core.

thanks for your help

Good idea.

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