[ale] Productive weekend!

[Charles Shapiro]

Hey, I'm back after over a year!

At the ALE Install Fest I bravely (or perhaps foolishly) wiped my aged aged
Debian 3.0 install and started down the road to a fresh, cool, new gentoo
box.
Got the thing to boot & run with no problem, then spent several full
fruitless days trying to get my SoundBlaster Audigy ZS card to work
properly. This was doubly frustrating 'cause it was working just fine in the
old system. I realized early that I'd have to download and install the full
ALSA 1.0.6a sound system, which I did. I wrassled through all of that stuff
and got it to the point where alsamixer(1) would talk to it, which usually
signifies a successful end of the road. But alas, no matter how I fiddled
the mixer settings, the card sounded like KRAP -- like an AM radio set just
to the side of the correct channel.

I struggled with it for about 4 hours (plus extensive google searches). Only
after re-verifying every diagnostic and software thing I could think of did
I try easter-egging the jacks on the back of the card. That's when I found
out that the whole problemo was that I had the speakers plugged in to the
wrong jack.  Sigh. So, for all you dispairing Linux emu10k1 SB Audigy users
out there, make sure you have the speakers plugged in to the 3rd jack from
the firewire port, at least if you're using standard POC PC speakers (as
opposed to high-end majic digital stereo stuff).   DON'T use the first jack
on the right, even though sound is coming out of it!

Given that googling for things like "audigy sound quality" didn't bring this
up, I wonder how many cards get returned 'cause folks don't know this?

After the epic sound card wrangle, the rest of the install was pretty
anticlimactic. And now I have USB mass storage working, firefox, gaim, et
cetera all happily living at home. I'm so excited!

Alas, late last night Speedfactory fell over all over Georgia. Guess we'll
hear some kvetching about that here..

-- CHS
(Charles Shapiro, late of NuBridges and now working for Turner)
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...