Issue with removing (disabling) a sound chip

Jonathan Claggett jonathan at claggett.org
Sun Nov 21 06:05:48 UTC 2004


Hi, I've recently attempted to disable a built in sound chip from a 
Fedora Core 3 computer and I ran into several issues which I believe 
stem back to the Alsa drivers. The reason for disabling the sound chip, 
BTW, was that I already had a Sound Blaster Live sound card that I 
wanted to use. The order of events are:

1. Disabled the VIA sound chip from the bios and booted up the machine.
2. Kudzu notified me of the missing sound card and I told it to remove 
its configuration and the boot up continued normally.
3. Attempted to login using the default Gnome desktop. All that appeared 
was the Fedora Splash screen but none of the launch icons appeared on 
that screen. The login process appeared to hang at this point.
4. Restarted X and logged in using the XFCE desktop and used the 
system-config-soundcard program to confirm that only one sound card was 
present and that the test sound was working (it was).
5. Attempted play a song from rhythmbox but was given a dialog message 
stating that 'Alsa device "default" does not exist'. No music files work.
6. Tuxracer does find the sound card, however.

I'd also add that re-enabling the soundcard just confused the 
system-config-soundcard program by displaying both soundcards but mixing 
up the two (e.g., playing the test sound for the built in soundcard 
actually delivered the sample to the SB Live card).

My question at this point is: what the best way to clean out the 
apparently messed up alsa configuration files and/or trick FC3 into 
treating the system as if the built in sound card was never there?

Thanks for the help,
Jonathan

PS Should I file this issue as a bug report?




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