[gentoo-dev] Broken Sound in KDE3

["Rob W" <rowboat@wi.rr.com>]

Paul,
Thanks for this suggestion, and all the suggestions of the others.  I have
stored your messages in a special file in case this comes up again.  It is
good to know where to find the actual modules, rather than in just .conf
files, and I appreciate the effort all of you have put into your messages.

As it is, I could not take it any more, and yesterday I erased my Gentoo
installation (mke2fs -j hda4 will do that!) and re-installed from an .iso
image based on the 2.4.19-gentoo kernel.  It was not just the sound that was
wrong:  my purchased copy of Crossover did not work for plugins; samba
printing from a Win2K client to the linux box did not work (multiple hours
lost combing through the smb.conf file), and of course sound did not work.
It seemed that functionality was terminally screwed up, and it was getting
worse.  Finally, X and my video drivers became unusable.

Everything started deteriorating after I did a 'emerge world update'.  That
process hung at the end, so it did not have a chance to completely update
the system, hence I believe the machine was left as a sort of hybrid,
partially 2.4.18 and partially 2.4.19-gentoo.  Also, the 'emerge world
update' loaded a new (default) 'make menuconfig' file, that included kernel
support for at least one sound card that I did not have.  Normally this
should not cause depmod -a to generate errors, but that's what I was
getting.  The errors all involved drivers in the ~/sound/pci directory,
which was weird, because I don't have a pci sound card.  Anyway, it was a
mess.

When I recompiled my kernel, I left oss sound, as well as the support for
the SB-16 ISAPNP, compiled as a module.  On the samba front, I said 'no' to
smb file system support.  In the previous kernel, I had compiled it (smb fs
support) into the kernel.  I think this interfered with samba, and prevented
printing with 'access denied' errors on the Windows client.  The help file
for that kernel option said that Samba works fine without smb fs support.
We shall see if that fixes the samba printing problem.

Right now the system boots without error via grub to the CLI.  I still need
to emerge X and KDE 3.0, ALSA, and all the other packages.  This is my
second install of Gentoo, and I think I'm going to get it right this time.
Just hope I don't need more 'practice.'

Cheers,
Rob W.