# Sound: Unresolved Symbols and Bad asound.conf

## Rob W

My ISAPNP SB16 card is not working in Gentoo 2.4.19-gentoo in KDE3, with newly emerged ALSA driver, utils, tools, you name it.  I remembered to rc-update add alsa boot (note: boot, not default, as per a recent post here, although default does not work either and gives the same errors).  Also, I did depmod -a, which yields 5 'unresolved symbols' in /lib/modules/2.4.19-gentoo/kernel/sound/pci/cs46xx/snd-cs46xx.o,

 ~/sound/pci/snd-cs4281.o

~snd-es1938.o,

~snd-sonicvibes.o

~/pci/trident/snd-trident-o.

The card is recognized at boot, the alsa module (snd-sb16) and oss modules (snd-mixer-oss and snd-pcm-oss) load, but generate errors complaining of 'hooks failed' and such.  Below is the text, hand-typed into this message because cut-and-paste does not work across these apps:

ALSA lib conf.c:1520:(snd_config_load1) _toplevel_:6:8:Unexpected char

ALSA lib conf.c:2616:(snd_config_hook_load) /etc/asound.conf may be old or corrupted: consider to remove or fix it

ALSA lib conf.c:2463:(snd_config_hooks_call) function snd_config_hook_load returned error: Unknown error

ALSA lib conf.c:2859:(snd_config_update_r) hooks failed, removing configuration

This same error is generated if I type 'amixer'.  So I renamed /etc/asound.conf and sure enough, the error message went away, and all I got was an 'asound.conf missing' error.

Oddly, after I unmuted amixer (only possible with /etc/asound.conf renamed, i.e., absent) I was able to play the pop.wav sound from the CLI.  No other sound works, though:  nothing in KDE Control Center, and nothing from xmms.  KDE is set to use the ALSA sound system in Control Center, although it does not work in any mode.

I did a google search for unresolved symbol errors in sound, and got nothing useful.

Was the ALSA system in Gentoo just updated so that my asound.conf is now broken?  How can I fix it?  This sound card used to work perfectly in Gentoo!

Sorry this is so verbose, but I hope the detail helps.

TIA,

Rob W

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## lx

Alsa-0.9.0rc1 is the latest. I don't have the file /etc/asound.conf so maybe your using an old version or even worse some mixed versions. rebuild all alsa modules if so (alsa-driver alsa-oss alsa-libs alsa-utils). Hope this helps,

Cya Alex.

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## Guest

Alex,

This morning I did you one better:  first I UNMERGED all the ALSA modules individually, then re-emerged them individually.  Still no joy.  I think I've wrecked this install of Gentoo, time to whack the HD and start over with a new .iso from Gentoo.  Life is too short to keep pouring this much time down the Linux rathole.  This is similar to why I gave up on Red Hat:  the rpms eventually killed the system via slow dependency death.

Cheers,

Rob w.

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## Guest

I have recently performed an update world and now sound refuses to work.  I am getting the same error as posted above and I have also posted the error in gentoo bugzilla.  It seems there may be a problem with the Intel8x0 driver as well as some others.

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## Rob W

Interesting--the previous post from Guest describes exactly what I did just prior to sound going completely kaputt.  It never occurred to me that it might be some kind of bug, I just assumed that I had mis-configured something.  The clue, though, is that both OSS and ALSA went out, at the same time.

The other related issue is that of alsactl.  That program complains loudly at boot, at least until /etc/asound.conf is renamed/removed.  That yields less verbose "missing asound.conf" errors.  Is there a new version of alsactl in the new alsa drivers?

Rob W.

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