Dell OEM Sound Blaster Live! now works with ALSA

Question

There's been a lot of discussion here in the past about the Dell OEM Sound Blaster Live! card and the difficulty of getting it to work with Linux. I won't rehash it all, but to summarize: the "real" Creative Sound Blaster Live! uses the EMU10K1 chip, while the Dell OEM card uses the EMU10K1X. The EMU10K1 is well-supported in Linux; the EMU10K1X ... not so much. There was no open source driver, only a commercial one from 4Front Technologies.

But as of the latest release of ALSA (1.0.5), there is now a snd-emu10k1x module. I haven't tested it thoroughly, but I'm listening to some mp3s right now, and they sound pretty good.

You can download the source from http://www.alsa-project.org . You'll want at least alsa-driver and alsa-utils. I've only tried it with the 2.6 kernel, but it should work with 2.2 or later.

Note: All channels are muted by default, so make sure you run alsamixer and unmute them or you won't hear anything.

My configuration:
Dell 4600
OEM Sound Blaster Live! (part #313-1932, PCI vendor=1102 device=0006)
Knoppix 3.4 (5/17/04 release, 2.6.6 kernel)
alsa-driver-1.0.5a
alsa-utils-1.0.5

lonytynch · Answer

I downloaded the 1.0.5 driver from the ALSA Project FTP and compiled it and all that good stuff earlier tonight. I followed the instructions to the tee and when it got to the step where you modprobe snd_emu10k1x, it gave me a FATAL error!

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START CODE
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[root@localhost alsa-driver]# modprobe snd-emu10k1x
FATAL: Error inserting snd_emu10k1x (/lib/modules/2.6.6-1.427.8kstacks/kernel/sound/pci/emu10k1/snd-emu10k1x.ko): Unknown symbol in module, or unknown parameter (see dmesg)

*****************************
END CODE
*****************************

Can anyone tell me what happened to make this come up? Will I need to reinstall? Call Batman? Please help!

Thanks in advance.

Jim Beam · Answer

One more thing. If you're using ALSA with OSS-compatibility, you should install the latest alsa-oss too. If lsmod shows modules like snd_pcm_oss, snd_mixer_oss, or snd_seq_oss, you need this package.

Jim Beam · Answer

I assume you followed the instructions in INSTALL:

./configure
make
su
make install
./snddevices
modprobe snd-emu10k1x

I didn't need to add any options to the configure script, but if your kernel source is not in /usr/src/linux, you need --with-kernel=/path/to/source.

I had another driver loaded (pcitable wrongly pairs 1102:0006 with the emu10k1 driver), so I had to modprobe -r snd_emu10k1 before I loaded the module.

Did you install alsa-lib 1.0.5? I neglected to mention in my first post that I installed the new alsa-lib too. Sorry.

As far as autoloading the module (after you get it to load at all), the installation instructions for the driver point out that updating /etc/modules.conf is not necessary for 2.6 kernels. But they don't seem to tell what IS necessary. I had to run alsaconf to get it to load the emu10k1x driver automatically when booting. Exactly what alsaconf does depends on which distro and kernel you're running, but with my Debian(Knoppix) and 2.6 kernel, it added two lines to /etc/modprobe.d/sound and /lib/modules/modprobe.conf:
alias snd-card-0 snd-emu10k1x
alias sound-slot-0 snd-emu10k1x

If none of this helps, does dmesg have anything useful? What about /var/log/messages (or syslog), or /var/log/kern.log?

Good luck.

stephane_la · Answer

thanks for the tip it worked great I did not need to install the libs or tools. I had to reboot b/c I could not unload the previous driver (EMU10K1) Dimension 2400 Mandrake 9.2 kernel 2.4.22-10mdk

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Dell OEM Sound Blaster Live! now works with ALSA

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