sherington

I should add, I am now using ALSA 1.0.8rc1. I don't think that would make any difference, I reckon if I went back to 1.0.7 it would still work.

SOLVED! Thanks to tiwai at the alsa-project web site I am now very happy with my fully working sound setup. In case this is useful to anybody else, here's what I did... - Disable ACPI in the BIOS With this setting disabled, KDE played sound without any problems, no stuttering and a very nice quality. I didn't check to see if amaroK played mp3s OK, but I guess that it would. However, xmms still didn't play mp3's, so... - Disable the sound system in the KDE Control Center With this setting disabled, xmms played mp3s very nicely with no stuttering during playback. mplayer also plays videos with sound without any of the aforementioned stability or grinding to a halt problems. So that's it. I'm now very happy.

Actually, I spoke to soon and it's pretty awful. Even if I don't touch my PC the sound playback speeds up, slows down, speeds up, slows down. It's better than nothing, but what a nitemare. I guess I'll have to look around for a better supported sound card, or maybe even try some other Linux distribution because I can't live with this problem!

Well, after some more fruitless hours of searching to try and sort this out, I now have sound of a sort, but only by completely ditching ALSA. If I use the cs46xx OSS module, and enable the KDE sound system I can use amaroK to play my mp3's and mplayer now plays my videos with sound OK. It sounds quite good, but there are still significant problems with the sound playback slowing down or stuttering when resizing windows etc. I guess I'll have to live with this for now unless someone can offer any help.

Hi, I really like the Mandrake Linux distribution, it always seems to handle all of my hardware really well with one notable exception - the sound card. I always, always, always have problems trying to get my sound card working. So much so, that I'm thinking about replacing it with a new Soundblaster card, but before I do I want to give my existing sound card one last chance. I'd be really grateful if anyone here could look over my problem and offer any advice or suggestions! The Hardware: - I have a MSI Neo2 Platinum motherboard. - It has integrated Intel Audio which I have disabled in the BIOS - Instead of the onoard audio, I use a Hercules Game Theater XP 5.1 PCI card - The card is detected as a Cirrus Logic CS 4614/22/24. - Athlon 64 3500+ CPU The Software: - Mandrake 10.1 OE (32 bit version), with all latest software updates applied as of 19/12/2004. - KDE 3.2.3 - Windows XP Pro SP2 (dual boot) - The ALSA version is 1.0.6, I did build and install 1.0.7 final from source, but it made no difference. The Symptoms: - If I use the onboard audio, everything seems fine - but I don't want to use the onboard audio. - If I use Windows XP, then everything is fine - but I obviously don't want to use Windows XP. - If I have sound enabled in the KDE control center, I hear nothing. The KDE video player seems to become very unstable and stop responding after a very short while. - If I have sound disabled in the KDE control center, I usually hear nothing. The KDE video player plays flawless video but obviously no sound. - If I have sound disabled in the KDE control center, but I use a non-kde video player (such as mplayer) then there is no sound and the video is very choppy eventually grinding to a halt. - If I have sound disabled in the KDE control center, and use xmms to play mp3s, I hear nothing. - If I have sound enabled in the KDE control center, Amarok looks like it plays the mp3s but I hear nothing. - "mplayer -nosound" plays flawless video, and obviously no sound After digging around these forums for quite a while, and trying a load of different things, I eventually got sound to work (a little) and that gave rise to these symptoms: - Tinny sound quality, and it doesn't play through all of the speakers - Sound playback stutters or gets choppy whenever I minimise a window, close a window, switch desktops, start applications and so on - Still have the problem of the KDE video player becoming very unstable - Still have the choppy/stuttering video playback with mplayer I eventually tried re-installing Mandrake 10.1 again to restore to a base installation - of course it still didn't work. It makes no difference whether I'm my own normal user, or logged in as root. I did see similar problems on earlier versions of Mandrake, but eventually I got 10.0 working reasonably well with very nice quality sound coming from all speakers. In short, even though I could eventually get some sort of sound working, the quality was poor and the video playback and application instability was still a big problem. I've already tried playing with kmix, aumix, alsamixergui and so on - no difference. This all looks to me like a problem with the Cirrus Logic 46xx driver, or an incompatibility between that driver and my card, or it is in fact the wrong driver for my card. Here is some diagnostic information... $uname -a Linux localhost 2.6.8.1-12mdk #1 Fri Oct 1 12:53:41 CEST 2004 i686 AMD Athlon 64 Processor 3500+ unknown GNU/Linux $lspcidrake | fgrep AUDIO snd-cs46xx : Cirrus Logic|CS 4614/22/24 [CrystalClear SoundFusion Audio Accelerator] [MULTIMEDIA_AUDIO] (vendor:1013 device:6003 subv:1681 subd:0050) $modprobe -l | grep snd-cs46xx /lib/modules/2.6.8.1-12mdk/kernel/sound/pci/cs46xx/snd-cs46xx.ko.gz /lib/modules/2.6.8.1-12mdk/kernel/sound/pci/cs46xx/snd-cs46xx.ko $lsmod | grep snd snd-seq-oss 33248 0 snd-seq-midi-event 6080 1 snd-seq-oss snd-seq 47856 4 snd-seq-oss,snd-seq-midi-event snd-pcm-oss 49832 0 snd-mixer-oss 17536 1 snd-pcm-oss snd-cs46xx 81896 0 snd-rawmidi 19496 1 snd-cs46xx snd-seq-device 7020 3 snd-seq-oss,snd-seq,snd-rawmidi snd-ac97-codec 69392 1 snd-cs46xx snd-pcm 82632 2 snd-pcm-oss,snd-cs46xx snd-timer 20452 2 snd-seq,snd-pcm snd-page-alloc 7464 2 snd-cs46xx,snd-pcm gameport 3328 1 snd-cs46xx snd 46916 10 snd-seq-oss,snd-seq,snd-pcm-oss,snd-mixer-oss,snd-cs46xx,snd-rawmidi,snd-seq-device,snd-ac97-codec,snd-pcm,snd-timer soundcore 7008 2 snd,audio $aumix -q aumix -q vol 90, 90, P pcm 77, 77 line 77, 77, P mic 0, 0, R cd 77, 77, P pcm2 77, 77 igain 80, 80 line1 77, 77, P line2 77, 77 phin 100, 100, P phout 100, 100, P video 100, 100, P $ls -l /dev/sound total 0 lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 7 Dec 19 11:31 adsp -> ../adsp lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 8 Dec 19 11:31 audio -> ../audio lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 9 Dec 19 11:31 dmmidi -> ../dmmidi lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 6 Dec 19 11:31 dsp -> ../dsp lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 7 Dec 19 11:31 midi -> ../midi lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 8 Dec 19 11:31 mixer -> ../mixer lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 12 Dec 19 11:31 sequencer -> ../sequencer lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 13 Dec 19 11:31 sequencer2 -> ../sequencer2 $ls -l /dev/*dsp* /dev/*audio* /dev/*mixer* /dev/*sequencer* /dev/*midi* crw-rw---- 1 mark audio 14, 12 Dec 19 11:31 /dev/adsp crw-rw---- 1 mark audio 14, 4 Dec 19 11:31 /dev/audio crw-rw---- 1 mark audio 14, 9 Dec 19 11:31 /dev/dmmidi crw-rw---- 1 mark audio 14, 3 Dec 19 11:31 /dev/dsp crw-rw---- 1 mark audio 14, 2 Dec 19 11:31 /dev/midi crw-rw---- 1 mark audio 14, 0 Dec 19 11:31 /dev/mixer crw-rw---- 1 mark audio 14, 1 Dec 19 11:31 /dev/sequencer crw-rw---- 1 mark audio 14, 8 Dec 19 11:31 /dev/sequencer2 $lspcidrake amd64-agp : nVidia Corp.| [bRIDGE_HOST] unknown : unknown (10de/00e0/1462/0250) [bRIDGE_ISA] unknown : unknown (10de/00e4/1462/0250) [sERIAL_SMBUS] usb-ohci : unknown (10de/00e7/1462/0250) [sERIAL_USB] usb-ohci : unknown (10de/00e7/1462/0250) [sERIAL_USB] ehci-hcd : unknown (10de/00e8/1462/0250) [sERIAL_USB] forcedeth : nVidia Corp.|Ethernet adapter [bRIDGE_OTHER] unknown : unknown (10de/00e5/1462/0250) [sTORAGE_IDE] sata_nv : nVidia Corp.| [sTORAGE_IDE] unknown : unknown (10de/00e2/ffff/ffff) [bRIDGE_PCI] unknown : unknown (10de/00ed/ffff/ffff) [bRIDGE_PCI] unknown : Advanced Micro Devices|K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] HyperTransport Technology Configuration [bRIDGE_HOST] unknown : Advanced Micro Devices|K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] Address Map [bRIDGE_HOST] unknown : Advanced Micro Devices|K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] DRAM Controller [bRIDGE_HOST] unknown : Advanced Micro Devices|K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] Miscellaneous Control [bRIDGE_HOST] Card:ATI Radeon (fglrx): ATI|Radeon 9800PRO NH (AGP) [DISPLAY_VGA] unknown : ATI|Radeon R300 [Radeon 9800] (Secondary) [DISPLAY_OTHER] rt2500 : RaLink|Ralink RT2500 802.11 Cardbus Reference Card [NETWORK_OTHER] snd-cs46xx : Cirrus Logic|CS 4614/22/24 [CrystalClear SoundFusion Audio Accelerator] [MULTIMEDIA_AUDIO] ohci1394 : VIA Technologies|OHCI Compliant IEEE 1394 Host Controller [sERIAL_FIREWIRE] r8169 : Realtek|RTL-8169 [NETWORK_ETHERNET] hub : Linux 2.6.8.1-12mdk ehci_hcd|EHCI Host Controller [Hub] hub : Linux 2.6.8.1-12mdk ohci_hcd|OHCI Host Controller [Hub] hub : Linux 2.6.8.1-12mdk ohci_hcd|OHCI Host Controller [Hub] All of my other hardware seems to work just fine, just not the sound card. Thanks in advance for any help! -M.

I couldn't burn any cd's with K3B on 10.0 Official until I added my user to the "cdwriter" group. Once I did that, it all worked fine.

Bingo! Thanks guys for helping. I had just left all of the settings for the sound-system at their defaults when I installed 10.0. It runs a LOT better now. Thank you!

Hi, This problem is driving me insane... I have a fresh install of Mandrake 10.0 Official Edition from the Powerpack DVD, and I use xmms to play my mp3 files. What is happening is that if I start playing an mp3 file and then skip to the next track, I get the original track playing at the same time as the next track for about 10 seconds. After those ten seconds, the next track plays as normal, until I skip to another track and so on. It's not like xmms is even fading one track out as it fades another in, it places both at full volume. I've looked in the xmms options but nothing stood out that might be causing this. I also have to say my system 'feels' a bit laggy when xmms is playing. Ran just fine, eventually, on 9.2 with the same hardware. (xmms 1.2.9 using aRts Output 0.7.1 plugin.) Totem plays tracks just fine, but I don't much like totem. Anyone have any hints, please?

Where? On this forum? I did a quick search but couldn't find it. A link would be appreciated!

I can confirm that Arthur's instructions DO work using a clean install from the Official 10.0 DVD, so thank you very much Arthur! I used the connection wizard to make a new ADSL connection, but in reality I used this just to make the config files. I still had to manually edit the /etc/ppp/peers/adsl file because the wizard refused to properly set the VCI and VPI numbers. I do have a follow-up question, though... Sometimes when I reboot my machine the line in modprobe.conf where you set "alias speedtch off" seems to disappear. Does anyone know of a way where I can make this a permanent change? Can I/should I do a rebuild of the Kernel with the speedtch module disabled? In summary, I'm just glad I got this working eventually. This has been a huge pain in the ar5e to get set up properly. It worked perfectly for me in 9.0 and 9.2.

Havin' it, Thanks for you info. I haven't tried this yet as I'm waiting for my 10.0 DVD to arrive, but I expect to soon... Do you have a LAN connection? Does that eth0 initialisation failure cause you any problems if you do? I really need a working LAN *and* ADSL connection. I noticed the VCI/VPI bizareness too this when I tried this a while ago! I'm starting to think that 80 quid for a new modem/router is going to be less trouble than trying to get this to work reliably.

I'm suffering similar problems with 10.0. The only google result I could find of any potential help was to add "-e 1" to the "/etc/ppp/peers/adsl" file, so it looks something like this: pty "/usr/local/sbin/pppoa3 -e 1 -vpi 8 -vci 35 -c" I don't personally know if this works or not, as I have spent enough time (for the moment at least) installing 10.0, having no internet connection working, and restoring 9.2 and getting it all back the way I like it. Hope this helps someone, if you do try it please post your results! By the way, a link that you may find useful in the future... Speedtouch Conf This has a shell-script file that sets up everything you should need to get the Speedtouch modem working. This worked a lot better for me than Mandrake's setup ever did, but doesn't work for 10.0!

Thanks spiny. (Must learn to search better!)

Does anyone know how I can change the default kicker icon to a png or xpm or whatever file of my choosing, i.e. the icon on the button that opens the KDE menu? On a similar note, does anyone know how I can change the KDE graphic that appears on the left hand side of the main KDE menu? I know how to disable/enable that graphic, but not to change it. Thanks!

What I usually do is to use a terminal login rather than the graphical login. Press ctrl+alt+f1 to get to a login prompt. Login as root. Type "init 3", without the quotes. This will, amongst other things, shut down the window manager. Then run your nvidia installation package. Reboot, or type "init 5" and press ctrl+alt+f7 to get back to the graphical login.

>still doesn't tell me >$USER >$ROOT >? >'~' could be anyone I built KDE as "my normal non root login user", and as per the konstruct readme it puts the output of the build into "/home/<my normal non root login user>/kde3.2". That's why I just used "~" in my original post. Apologies if it wasn't clear. The konstruct readme says to use "~", but with hindsight it would have been better I think to specify the full absolute path instead. The other folder mentioned, ".kde32", was used to store the new KDE 3.2 settings/config so that I could keep my original KDE 3.1 settings untouched in ".kde". I also edited my .bashrc file to include those new environment settings like Peep described. I would have liked to have persevered with this, but the bizarre core dump problems I was experiencing meant I got some unofficial KDE 3.2 RPMS via a link from pclinuxonline and used those. Now everything appears to be fine. Thanks all for helping.

Well, at first it seemed like stuff was indeed working despite the apparent dcop problem. However, a short while later when I rebooted my machine I got to the logon screen and no matter what I tried (no matter which user I tried) KDE just refused to start and kept returning me back to the logon screen. The reason for my reboot was that something was causing repeated (seemed to be in a tight loop) core dumps to be generated and completely filled up the 4Gb on my "/" partition. Once I'd deleted all of the core dumps, I could no longer start KDE as described just above. It also seems that I can no longer reliably switch back to KDE 3.1. So basically, I am somewhat screwed. I can get back in to KDE 3.1 by manually starting X from a console login. I decided to abandon the whole idea and am now going to download and install the latest Mandrake 10.0 beta which includes KDE 3.2. Admittedly, I am pretty much a Linux newbie (I've been running Mandrake for about 2 years but this is the first time I had a proper go and building my own KDE) so that may be a contributory factor to my problems, but I do pretty much know what I'm doing most of the time. :D So anyway, I too would like to know what the original problem was, but I have more severe problems now and I've decided to jack the whole thing in.

If I set up "root" to use my new KDE 3.2 build, and log in as root, it all seems to work. So now I'm guessing it's a privileges problem. But what could it be? I can read/write to "/tmp" without any problems. Any hints at all, please!?

KMail -> Settings -> Configure KMail... -> Network -> Receiving -> <incoming-account-name> -> Modify -> General -> Check Interval I guess that's what you're after.

I've never done this before, so I thought I'd give it a go... I downloaded the KDE 3.2 stable Konstruct, installed the dependencies I needed, and built KDE 3.2 from scratch. Some hours later the build completed without any errors, including all of the KDE packages and koffice and so on. I then followed the instructions in the Konstruct README, specifically to do with setting QTDIR, KDEDIR, LD_LIBRARY_PATH, and PATH to point to my newly created ~/kde3.2 directory. I also changed the KDEHOME value to point to ~/.kde32test so that I could keep my old KDE 3.1 settings. I then rebooted (Windows habits die hard). Now, when I log in to my new KDE build I get the KDE 3.2 splash screen, it sticks at "Setting up interprocess communication" for a little while, then the splash screen flashes off and back on again and hangs at "Setting up interprocess communication" again. Meanwhile my desktop starts up and I can start applications and so on. Clearly something is still wrong somewhere. Does anybody have any hints? I don't know where to look for errors in log files etc??? Thanks.

Hi, Usually when I build packages from source, I just do: configure make su -c "make install" No problem with that. What I'd like to make sure though, is that when I build from sources that I am getting the full benefit of compiler optimisations for my CPU - I'm not sure that configure and/or make is detecting my Athlon CPU and making the best possible optimisations. I know that I can do something like this when I build, specifying flags such as... -march=athlon ...but how do I know which marchitecture to choose? From the gcc man page: "The choices for cpu-type are i386, i486, i586, i686, pentium, pentium-mmx, pentiumpro, pentium2, pentium3, pentium4, k6, k6-2, k6-3, athlon, athlon-tbird, athlon-4, athlon-xp, athlon-mp, winchip-c6, winchip2 and c3." Does it matter which of the athlon-xxx options I specify? How do I know which one I should use? Is there a tool I can use to give me definitive processor information? I have no idea which particular type of Athlon I have. Any hints would be appreciated.

I am pretty much an iptables newbie, so I need a little bit of help... :D I have managed, by scouring various HOWTOs and FAQs, to get a decent iptables ruleset up and running that gives me: 1. firewall protection, simply blocks most incoming network traffic, 2. the routing I need to my XBox (for XBox Live!). 3. internet connection sharing via masquerading to another PC on my network I have a very simple network setup with my Linux PC connecting to the internet via ppp, and a network hub connecting the PC, another PC and the XBox. The XBox uses the PC's internet connection. The hub is just a dumb hub with no configuration or routing of its own. All of this works just fine for me, although I have to admit I don't fully understand all of the iptables rules that I've had to create. It works, and I'm happy enough with that. My problem is this, my iptables ruleset currently has a hard-coded static IP address for my internet connection. These rules are used to route traffic from the XBox to the internet and vice versa. At the moment, this is OK. However, I want to upgrade my internet connection to a higher capacity (1Mb from 512Kb) - part of this upgrade will mean that I will have a dynamically assigned IP address from the ISP for the internet connection rather than the static IP I have now. The firewall script and the script(s) that start the internet connection both run automatically when the PC is started up. How do I handle this dynamic IP in my ruleset? Any pointers or help will be gratefully appreciated.

Thanks Inkubus. (I already had the symlink in place.) Your suggestion worked perfectly, i.e. just put "java -jar" in there. I suppose I was guilty of trying to over-complicate things. I presumed I'd need to use a file-name substitution token or something in the execute string, like %f %m %n or whatever. I still haven't found any information on what those tokens are, but at least now I can launch my Java applications very easily now. Thanks for your help.

Hi, This is driving me mad. I've googled and still can't get any further. I want to be able to create a file-type association for Java .jar files so that I can execute a jar file simply by clicking on it in the desktop (specifically KDE). In addition, I don't want a terminal window to appear. I know where to go to edit file associations in Konqueror settings, but I'm struggling with configuring the execution string. To launch a jar file, I normally do this in konsole: /home/java/jre/bin/java -jar nameofjarfile.jar So presumably I need to do something like: /home/java/jre/bin/java -jar <some-special-token-to-substitute-the-file-name> The problem is I can't find an explanation of what substitution token I'm supposed to use anywhere! %c, %U %m, what? Any help will be appreciated, thanks!

You're right of course. I did subsequently post that I'd executed the cdrecord command line and it had failed too. So, I removed the cdrecord package that installs by default with 9.2, and put on an earlier version (cdrecord-2.0-2mdk.i586.rpm) instead. Everything now works. It's just unfortunate that 9.2 did not work out-of-the-box for me. Thanks for the help.