Mandrake question -- No sound

OK, so I am new to this stuff and I just don't see what I need to do here.

When I put an audio CD in either of my drives, mandrake launches some type of media player but I don't have any sound. So I go nosing around to see what I can find and I got to some type of audiio mixer but none of those controls help.

Since I am new at this, I would guess that it is some type of driver issue but I don't really know what to do next. Any help would be appreciated.

Um I am using the audio chip on my Abit NF7 something or other mobo if that helps.

so your audio mixers settings are all turned on... but you get no sound?

whats the output of lsmod?
and lspci? -- i believe the nforce2 audio on that is a AC97
so see if that module is loaded

Well, I ran those commands but the output might as well be in Greek at this point.

OK lsmod gives me this:

Module Size Used by
isofs 36828 0
zlib_inflate 23488 1 isofs
md5 4896 1
ipv6 264608 8
sg 41020 0
sr_mod 18724 0
lp 13608 0
snd-seq-oss 36480 0
snd-seq-midi-event 8768 1 snd-seq-oss
snd-seq 58768 4 snd-seq-oss,snd-seq-midi-event
snd-pcm-oss 55716 0
snd-mixer-oss 20608 1 snd-pcm-oss
snd-intel8x0 36040 1
snd-ac97-codec 64740 1 snd-intel8x0
snd-pcm 103488 2 snd-pcm-oss,snd-intel8x0
snd-timer 27748 2 snd-seq,snd-pcm
gameport 5696 1 snd-intel8x0
snd-page-alloc 13508 2 snd-intel8x0,snd-pcm
snd-mpu401-uart 8800 1 snd-intel8x0
snd-rawmidi 25984 1 snd-mpu401-uart
snd-seq-device 9256 3 snd-seq-oss,snd-seq,snd-rawmidi
snd 57636 14 snd-seq-oss,snd-seq-midi-event,snd-seq,snd-pcm-oss,snd-mixer-oss,snd-intel8x0,snd-ac97-codec,snd-pcm,snd-timer,snd-mpu401-uart,snd-rawmidi,snd-seq-device
soundcore 10976 1 snd
af_packet 23336 2
hid 57728 0
raw 8800 1
ide-floppy 20864 0
ide-tape 39184 0
ide-cd 43876 0
cdrom 40640 2 sr_mod,ide-cd
floppy 63220 0
forcedeth 16448 0
ohci1394 37636 0
ieee1394 294448 1 ohci1394
nls_cp850 5728 1
vfat 16640 1
fat 49024 1 vfat
nls_iso8859-1 4896 2
ntfs 91660 1
supermount 41712 2
ppa 13512 0
parport_pc 36064 1
imm 13928 0
scsi_mod 122384 4 sg,sr_mod,ppa,imm
parport 43688 4 lp,ppa,parport_pc,imm
ehci-hcd 26916 0
ohci-hcd 20740 0
usbcore 108860 5 hid,ehci-hcd,ohci-hcd
rtc 14056 0
ext3 122600 2
jbd 66168 1 ext3

And lspci gives me this:

00:00.0 Host bridge: nVidia Corporation nForce2 AGP (different version?) (rev c1)
00:00.1 RAM memory: nVidia Corporation nForce2 Memory Controller 1 (rev c1)
00:00.2 RAM memory: nVidia Corporation nForce2 Memory Controller 4 (rev c1)
00:00.3 RAM memory: nVidia Corporation nForce2 Memory Controller 3 (rev c1)
00:00.4 RAM memory: nVidia Corporation nForce2 Memory Controller 2 (rev c1)
00:00.5 RAM memory: nVidia Corporation nForce2 Memory Controller 5 (rev c1)
00:01.0 ISA bridge: nVidia Corporation nForce2 ISA Bridge (rev a4)
00:01.1 SMBus: nVidia Corporation nForce2 SMBus (MCP) (rev a2)
00:02.0 USB Controller: nVidia Corporation nForce2 USB Controller (rev a4)
00:02.1 USB Controller: nVidia Corporation nForce2 USB Controller (rev a4)
00:02.2 USB Controller: nVidia Corporation nForce2 USB Controller (rev a4)
00:04.0 Ethernet controller: nVidia Corporation nForce2 Ethernet Controller (rev a1)
00:05.0 Multimedia audio controller: nVidia Corporation nForce MultiMedia audio [Via VT82C686B] (rev a2)
00:06.0 Multimedia audio controller: nVidia Corporation nForce2 AC97 Audio Controler (MCP) (rev a1)
00:08.0 PCI bridge: nVidia Corporation nForce2 External PCI Bridge (rev a3)
00:09.0 IDE interface: nVidia Corporation nForce2 IDE (rev a2)
00:0d.0 FireWire (IEEE 1394): nVidia Corporation nForce2 FireWire (IEEE 1394) Controller (rev a3)
00:1e.0 PCI bridge: nVidia Corporation nForce2 AGP (rev c1)
01:0b.0 RAID bus controller: CMD Technology Inc Silicon Image SiI 3112 SATARaid Controller (rev 02)
02:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation NV15DDR [GeForce2 Ti] (rev a4)

New info, I finally found my mp3 files and those work fine (well they don't sound all that great but that is another topic). But I still don't have any sound when I put in an audio CD.

Also, it seems that the problem might be specific to the drive that I am using. If I put a CD into my burner, I get qan CD player app that plays the CD but no sound. If I put the same disc into my DVD drive, I get the same player app but it reports no disc. Then I hit play on the drive and I get music.

Now when I do this, the media player is not involved but there is a slider in the mixer app that can cut the volume, which suggests to me that it is not simply some hardware player in my mobo but an actual linux thing going on.

Any clues?

Try getting one of those little cables and connecting the 4 pins in back of your cd rom player to those on your sound card.

Also, open a console and type "alsamixer" and unmute all channels and turn up the volume. See if that helps.

You want to make sure ALSA (Advanced Linux Sound Architecture) is working. If it plays mp3's it should be. (Note: mp3's sound great on my nforce built in audio, as do cdroms and dvd's, I suspect tinkering will make yours sound good too.) I'm not really sure how to do that in Mandrake, it's pretty easy in gentoo with portage though, so I doubt it's that hard.

The audio cable might be consistent with the fact that only my DVD drive can be pressed into use. I haven't opened my case over tha matter but I would bet that I have that cable running from the drive to the mobo header. Yet I have a reservation here in that Windows can play CDs from either drive over the IDE bus. And as I said above, the burner fires up the media player app and attempts to play the Cd where the DVD drive fires up the player but fails to find a CD.

And yes, alsamixer says that it is unmuted on all channels. In fact, the thing about being able to control the volmue when I play from my DVD drive with no apparent player running makes me think that alsa is working on some level. Whatever is playing the CD in that case has to be running as a process with no graphic front end visible to KDE.

So how can I find out what processes are running? It would seem to me to be fairly simple if I had that list to see what comes up when I play a CD. Then I would need to connect whatever that is to some type of graphic front end program.

ps -ef will show you the processes running. Also, top will do it, in a more interactive sense, updating it on an ongoing basis. There are some gui tools as well, but they won't be installed unless you installed them.