FYI: ISA sound cards no longer supported

[Kam Leo]

On 5/3/07, Mikkel L. Ellertson <mikkel at infinity-ltd.com> wrote:
> Kam Leo wrote:
> > If you are using FC6 or FC7 and have problems with sound your problem
> > may be due to the developers removing support for legacy ISA sound
> > cards. The driver for the card will no longer be automatically loaded.
> > I discovered this after filing this bug report,
> > https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=234021 .
> >
> > If ALSA still supports your card all is not lost. The fix is to
> > manually tell the kernel to load the driver. In my case I edited
> > /etc/rc.local and appended the following two lines:
> >
> > modprobe -r snd-sbawe
> > modprobe snd-sbawe
> >
> > Change snd-sbawe to whatever is appropriate for your system.
> >
> Maybe I am missing something here, but wouldn't it work to edit
> /etc/modprobe.conf and add something like: (You would need to run
> depmod after making the change.)
>
> alias snd-card-0 snd-sbawe

That entry for my sound card was been in /etc/modprobe.conf since the
original installation of FC6 which used the 2.6.18 kernel. The entry
is still there. The problem is that the newer kernels no longer load
the module during the boot process.

Troubleshooting the problem I used system-config-soundcard. The
utility correctly identified my sound card. Pressing the Test button,
however, produced no sound. Clicking the System tab and Reload
restored sound. But when I rebooted my system the sound module did not
load. I used Google and found a thread where someone used
/etc/rc.local to fix an Intel chipset sound problem.


> Also, why are you removing the snd-sbawe module in rc.local?
>

Somewhere the system keeps score and knows that the module has
previously been loaded. If you run "modprobe snd-awe" again you get an
error. Thus, I had to first remove any reference to the module before
the module would actually load

> Mikkel