[NBLUG/talk] Debian--Mixer device not found

[Troy Arnold]

On Tue, Dec 20, 2005 at 11:30:55AM -0800, A'fish'ionado wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I'm fiddling with my laptop (a Dell Inspiron 1000--the same one I demoed
> Ubuntu on the other week). There's no functioning sound mixer device under
> Debian. The sound card does work; I can pull up a game and the sound for it
> does play, but since there's no mixer device, only one application at a time
> can play sound, and I have no volume control. Help me before I go deaf. :-)
> 
> I could have sworn that the mixer was working fine at one point, so,
> chalking the problem up to something I did while tinkering, I reinstalled
> Debian. This cleared the cruft out of my home directory :-) but did not fix
> the problem at all. Note to self: This is Linux not Windows--rebooting or
> reinstalling does not fix everything. :-P
> 
> The mixer device, tantalizingly, works fine under Ubuntu. Both are running
> 2.6 series kernels. I compared the outputs of lsmod, and tried modprobing
> the various modules loaded under Ubuntu, but not Debian. Ubuntu loads a
> module named snd-mixer-oss that Debian doesn't, but loading the module
> manually under Debian doesn't seem to help. I also noticed that the file
> /etc/modules.d/alsa-conf exists under Ubuntu, but not Debian; copying the
> file over to Debian and rebooting didn't fix the problem, either, so I
> removed it.

Try running 'alsaconf'

Launch 'alsamixer' (in alsa-utils package) from a console and see if you
get any helpful messages.

make sure /dev/mixer exists and your user is able to write to it.
Mine looks like so:
crw-rw---- 1 root audio 14, 0 2004-03-11 12:15 /dev/mixer0

Where my regular user is a member of the audio group.

-troy