My first ever linux problem: no sound

Thankyou!!!

I managed to get A gui back with startx, bringing me into KDE. Sadly, exiting KDE brings me back to the prompt, and when I type telinit 5 and hit enter, i'm told that the command doesn't exist. As for the sound, I still have no idea. Now the onboard ac97 codec is detected and installed, but no sound. Do I have to manually configure the module?

Your problem lies in the software above kernel. There are different sound daemons for KDE and GNOME. Look in KDE sound controls, see if sound works in GNOME, can you play stuff with XMMS using different output plugins.

You have to use "/sbin/telinit" or "/usr/sbin/telinit" then.

Sound doesn't work in either KDE or Gnome, or any of the others. The only sound controls I have foound are the mixers and player in the default sound 'folder' on the proc menu, and the only other place I have found to do with sound is the sound config and module config in the hardware list (Hardrake is it?)

Is there something I'm missing. If not, could you please take me through it a step or two at a time or something. I'm completely lost on this now, and I didn't have much of a clue before!

Are you sure the sound card driver you have is for ALSA and not OSS? You can change the sound system used in the KDE control panel. And you can switch between different output systems in XMMS also. On my RedHat the integrated sound worked only with OSS (when I had 2.4 kernel).

Also, there is an option in the sound settings that tells KDE whether to load souns daemon automatically. If you managed to untick that then you'd have to load it manually. I can't remember right now if KDE used esd or artsd

Have you managed to get your machine to boot into graphical interface? You may have different services loading for the text mode session and GUI and maybe some sound components don't get loaded.

Yea. It's booting into the GUI now. Some how, after installing a few things from the mandrake disks, the option to boot into gui got unchecked, but that's checked again now.

Both sound cards I've tried using (c-media, and the ac97 onboard) are supported by a driver, and are compatable with alsa. The sound won't operate in any interface, I cand find any sound services in the computer control panel (is that the computer config, with the hardware list etc?). Both alsa and each card runs on init level 3 (???), but aside from that, I don't understand the konsole readouts with the 'classic' troubleshooter it gives me from sndconfig ---> help.

So what are the readouts?

And something being "compatible" with ALSA doesn't mean it actually works. Try switching to OSS and see if it helps.

I trust you are not using a custom kernel where you forgot to put in module autoloading?

I think that Mandrake sets the sound to mute by default. Run aumix from the command line and adjust the sound levels with that.

And do all the experimenting as root to resolve any problems with permissions.

You might try getting the sndconfig RPM from the web. It's easy to set your card manually with this utility, if it's not autodetected properly, which is about 50% of the time in Linux, from what I've seen. You can can get it here: http://www.rpmfind.net/linux/rpm2html/search.php?query=sndconfig