Temporarily enablingdisabling a sound card in SuSE 9.3 209

On 21 Jan 2006 23:00:46 -0800, AN O'Nymous staggered into the Black Sun and said:

Actually, this isn't true. I forgot about the onboard sound in my desktop, since I never use it. I went and set it up earlier, and discovered a few things that might be useful.

I've verified that it doesn't. But there are other things that are counterintuitive that may be causing problems. I'll try to explain them.

If you have 2 soundcards set up with ALSA, you're going to get 2dev-dsp devices (and 2 mixers, and 2 adsp devices, and....) The real problem is that alsaconf only sets up one sound card at a time (and unloads modules for other cards while it does that!) I can sort of see why it does that, but it does make setting multiple sound cards up annoying.

No worries. Use alsaconf (or YaST in your case) to set up your main card. Then "modprobe sndWHATEVER" to get your secondary card up. You can put that modprobe command inetc-rc.d-rc.local , or wherever SuSE is putting their boot.local these days. Or you can edit modules.conf or the files underetc-modules.dand stick "alias snd-card-1 sndwhatever" in there.

2 sound devices, so: dev-dsp is the first module loaded (sndens1371 here, my PCI sound card, connected to speakers) anddev-dsp1 is the second one (sndintel8x0 here, the onboard card, connected to headphones.) I can control which device any sound is output to fairly easily. "play something.wav" outputs to the speakers. "play -ddev-dsp1 something.wav" outputs to the headphones. In xmms, I can go device gets the xmms output.

What puzzles me is that there seems to be no easy way to output a sound to all devices available. Maybe there is one, and I'm just totally missing it. Any hardcore ALSA people out there want to chime in?

I think this must be something related to the automated ALSA setup. Maybe. Um... what does "lsmod grep snd" report for you?

Onboard sound is usually sndintel8x0 or sndvia82xx. Usually. There are a few cases where you get an es1371 onboard, but the Intel and Via chips are a few $ cheaper, so that's what most board manufacturers use. Anyway, HTH, sorry for forgetting my desktop's onboard chip yesterday.

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