Member Avatar for ankurkumar78

Hi,

I'm using Debian Sarge and trying to configure sound card, which is an integrated one with ASUS motherboard (ASUS SiS661FX/SiS963L/W697-P4S800MX (PGA 478)).

Sound card: SoundMAX Integrated Digital Audio

I downloaded ALSA and configured it (using ./configure), but when doing "make" it says "ALSA is already in Linux Kernel".

I don't know how can I configure ALSA in Debian now??

Please help....

Thanks,

Ankur

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Dani AI

Generated

As discovered, the message "ALSA is already in Linux Kernel" simply means the kernel already contains ALSA support, so building external ALSA driver modules is unnecessary. In that case the remaining work is verification, mixer configuration, and making sure the correct modules are loaded and settings persist across reboots.

Useful checks and quick diagnostics:

aplay -l
cat /proc/asound/cards
lsmod | grep snd
dmesg | egrep -i 'snd|sound'
alsamixer
  • aplay -l and /proc/asound/cards confirm the kernel sees the card.
  • lsmod | grep snd shows which ALSA modules are loaded.
  • dmesg reveals kernel messages related to the driver.
  • alsamixer is used to unmute and set levels.

Persistence and permissions: save mixer state so levels survive reboots with

sudo alsactl store

and ensure the local user has permission to use audio devices (add the user to the audio group):

sudo adduser <username> audio

If the card does not appear at all, check that onboard audio is enabled in the BIOS and inspect kernel logs for reasons the module may not load. When further diagnosis is needed, the outputs of the commands above are the most useful details for pinpointing whether a module is missing, the device is disabled, or only mixer settings remain to be adjusted.

Member Avatar for ankurkumar78

my soundcard is working now.
i installed new kernel image: apt-get install kernel-image-2.4-686, which is Linux kernel image for version 2.4 on PPro/Celeron/PII/PIII/P4.
then i installed alsa: apt-get install alsa
and run alsaconf

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