No Audio with Retro 4.2 (Solved!)

[wmichaelb]

Hi, I'm running Puppy 4.2 retro on an old HP Vectra VL, 350 MHz PII, 190 MB of RAM, and a 20 GB HD. The system has sound built into the mobo, and when I run alsaconf, it finds an AZT 1008 PNP sound device. If I hit enter, it then says:

Configuring snd-azt2320
PLEASE ANSWER YES HERE SO PUPPY WILL USE DRIVER ON NEXT BOOT
Do you want to modify /etc/modprobe.conf?

I hit enter for yes, and get:

OK, sound driver is configured.

ALSA WIZARD will prepare the card for playing now.

Technical: "/etc/rc.d/rc alsa start" will be used to initialize Alsa, amixer used to raise volume.

You can change the volume later via a mixer program such as sGmixer (Multimedia menu), or click on speaker icon in tray for volume slider.

I get a nice bark out of the speakers, and everything plays nicely. Except...there is no speaker control in the tray, and when I reboot, I have to reload the ALSA driver all over again. Is there something missing from the install in the ALSA files that I should look for?

Thanks in advance!
- Michael B. in Cincinnati

[wmichaelb]

In the middle of all this, the original Vectra sound card died. I got lucky and scored an ISA Soundblaster card on Amazon.com of all places, for $10. After installation, it played just fine. But when I rebooted, it wouldn't play until I reinstalled the driver.

I looked at the modprobe.conf file, but the correct driver reference was there, so I figured that it had to be an alsa problem. After some searching, I found:

http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=37800

which recommended this:

"Add the command listed below and put this line in your /etc/rc.d/rc.local file.
Code:
/etc/rc.d/rc.alsa start"

I rebooted, and immediately played music with no other problems. Thanks, conra!