Linux Journal: Getting the Sound Back

“I like to bop around with my MP3 player while I deal with the
ones and zeros of the computer world. When I upgraded to the 2.4
kernel, I lost my sound for no apparent reason. I took this as a
personal insult and made it my mission to conquer the computer. The
audience for this article is mainly those who have had sound but
lost it during a kernel upgrade. For first-timers, I recommend the
sound HOWTO document found at http://www.linuxdocs.org.”

“The first step is finding out what type of sound card you have.
Hopefully you remember, but if not, try looking at the physical
card; there is usually a manufacturer’s name printed somewhere on
it. Otherwise, you should have either a box or your computer specs,
if the card was included. If you are lazy and want to continue
sitting in your comfy chair and typing on the keyboard, then you
can try running sndconfig, a RedHat utility for detecting and
installing a sound card. If you do not have a sound card and are
trying to configure for on-board sound, you’re probably not going
to have much luck. If this is your situation, do not run sndconfig
because it may freeze your computer and not allow you to re-boot,
(getting out of this mess is a whole other article, so don’t do
it). The explanation for on-board sound problems is related to
sound blaster compatibility, discussed later in this article. If
you have sound working on an old kernel, a last ditch effort would
be to find which module was installed to enable the sound. You can
locate this information in your etc/modules.conf file.”

Complete
Story