Fedora Werewolf (fc8) on toshiba laptop… the sound saga

Following up on my previous posts regarding my new Toshiba A215 laptop with the goofy sound card :

• Fedora Linux (fc8) on my new laptop… the wireless saga
• Linux, Vista, and my new laptop

In my previous posts, I mentioned that I was having a hard time getting the sound working under linux/fedora. In case you don’t know, FC8 uses Pulse Audio which is new. There have been reports of various sound problems related to permissions, users, and other items.

• Fixing Broken Sound in Fedora

Out of the box, Fedora is using ALSA sound drivers. For all intents and purposes, every looks like it should work.

1. all daemons start
2. sound card is detected
3. kernel modules are loaded
4. test sounds appear to be played, yet no sound is heard

I even went as far as downloading the source for the ALSA drivers since I had seen some mention of a bug with my sound card I have an Azalia SB600. I lived with it for a couple of weeks now and I was really missing my music. So, one a whim I tried the OSS (Open Sound Service) drivers. Any you know what? It works.

Now, it doesn’t work like you’d think. Pulse Audio doesn’t appear to use it and Gnome doesn’t find any sound cards, (Actually, Pulse creates a faux ESD process that Gnome uses). Who cares. I got sound and it works good. All apps I’ve tested work; stand alone and webbased.

Ah, but how to control the overall master volume to direct sound only out to the headphones. The OSS drivers some with their own utilities. There is an ossxmix‘er that works superbly.

Still, not as easy as a Mac, but a lot of fun!

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