Sound card pain and suffering...

[ME]

On Tue, 20 Feb 2001, Loraditch, Greg wrote:
> I also have a problem with my Ensoniq 1371 sound card.  Suddenly there is a
> problem with the es1371.o file.....can't seem to recognize the card on boot
> up.
> 
> Any thoughts?  I'm currently using RH 6.0  (no wisecracks, please)

Some questions for it:
Did you recently change your kernel, and not make+install any
modules? Does your new kernel (if used) have support for the sound card
included?

Was 
# depmod -a

(Any errors?)

run after installing a new kernel and modules. (I would expect RH to do
this during every startup, but you never know.)

Have you installed any new hardware that was PnP that is not IRQ sharing
or trying to resource share IO/IRQ with yoursound card?

Usually, with Linux, once things are set up working, they continue to work
until something is changes on the system. (Ignoring the second law of
thermodymaics, and applying newtonian physics of motion to make an
obviously false statement for the long term, "A stable Linux box remains
stable until acted upon by other software, or users, while an unstable
windows box will remain unstable until acted upon by a Linux install.)

So, the better question, what things have changed between the time that
the sound card was working, and now. (Counting between reboots, so...
If the last time you booted your machine to hear the sound work, and the
next time you rebooted your machine and sound did not work, what has
changed.)

Other things to look at later with diagnostics will be your kernel bootup
message with
# dmesg |less -i
and search for "Sound" or "ess" to see what it claims during boot up.

If you have some feedback there, then you might then go to cat-ing
/proc/interrupts and /proc/io* to see if the sound card resources are
listed there.

Then if that is true, try cat-ing audio files directly to your sound card,
and see if they play. If this works, then maybe you are running esd or
something like that and the application is either using a
blocking/exclusive access to the /dev to prevent audio from playing
through.

There are many things that *could* be wrong. 

More info would be good.

Feel free to post a copy of the output of dmesg to the list here as well
as output from /proc/interrupts and /proc/io*

(eg:
# dmesg > /tmp/somefilename.txt
# echo "==============" >> /tmp/somefilename.txt
# cat /proc/interrupts >> /tmp/somefilename.txt
# echo "==============" >> /tmp/somefilename.txt
# cat /proc/io* >> /tmp/somefilename.txt

Then you can include a copy of the contents of /tmp/somefilename.txt at
the end of your next message.

(Sorry if you know the above. I am not trying to be a wise-guy here. I
don't know how much you know, and do not want to assume too much.)

-ME