sound is driving me crazy!

[whb]

i have fedora core 4 on a brand-new dell inspiron 1300 laptop and the only complaint i have is the absence of sound. i've installed the alsa driver and it detects my soundcard on the autodetect thing, but when it goes to play the test sound, i hear nothing! after playing it just says that 'automatic detection of the sound card did not work. audio will not be available on this system. please click ok to continue". i read somewhere that i should use kMix to resolve the problem, however, when I go to kMix a blank form comes up with just one menu to select what mixer i want to use, and the menu is empty. please help me get my sound!

thank you for all your time!!

will brown

[suetanvil]

A little googling reveals that sound should work on your computer. If you check out http://www.linux-on-laptops.com/dell.html, you'll see a couple of pages for people who've gotten it working, albeit on other Linux distros.

Since I don't have a Dell and don't have sound, I can only make some guesses here.

Firstly, have you considered upgrading to FC5? The web pages I looked at seemed to imply that getting sound working on that model was a relatively recent thing. (Yes, I know that's a pain, but you might want to look into it.)

Alternately, have you tried:

1. Installing the updates?
2. Making sure you've installed every package with 'alsa' in the name?
3. Running 'system-configure-sound'?

Finally, you might try doing a 'modprobe snd' as root. If that doesn't work, find out the audio chipset your laptop uses, find the name of the driver it uses and modprobe that as well, then rerun system-configure-sound.

Sorry I can't be more helpful.

[rajeev1982]

Hey I got the same problem on my system. the external amplifire is switched off. you must be getting the volume controle on the desktop panel, goto the mixer and switch on the externel amplifire. it will start working.

to find out the external amplifire, you mey need to do some RnD.

Bye,
Rajeev