where from here...

[Paul Higgins]

On Monday 04 September 2006 08:11, Eric Dunbar wrote:

> > 2. CD... no sound... got the cool guitar music from the sound card
> > configurator,
> > get the song names in the player window like it should be playing....
> > made sure the volume was up....
> > but NO SOUND and no error message.... and no import to rythmbox 0.8.x
> > music player
> > It would be nice to soothe my savage beast with some smooth jazz as I
> > explore this alien OS...

Can't help you a whole lot with the other stuff, but sound I can.  You first 
need to open a terminal and use the "alsamixer" command.  This will bring up 
a control panel right in the terminal window where you hopefully will be able 
to adjust your sound settings.  You can read the manpage (man alsamixer), or 
to print the manpage (assuming you have a working printer with your system):

man -t alsamixer | lp

I've found that at least on my system, I have to use alsamixer in a terminal 
before I use any of the other tools in the GUI or things won't work well.  
Unfortunately, I also have to go back to alsamixer each time I reboot or even 
logout.  It's kind of a hassle; I just wish I knew if there was a config file 
I could edit to make my settings permanent.

As for Rhythmbox, you may need to go into the preferences and experiment with 
various settings there.  I think I got everything working by using /dev/dsp 
for sound device and ALSA for sound server.  The whole sound thing is kind of 
frustrating, and I think it's largely due to Apple keeping everything a big 
secret when it comes to their soundcards.  The x86 Linux world is way ahead 
of PPC Linux when it comes to this kind of thing, unfortunately.

> Lack of sound is a known issue and I'm fairly sure there is a
> documented solution to your problem (in the archives of this mailing
> list and also in the YDL forum). I never gave a damn about sound on
> YDL (why does a server need sound ;-) so I didn't try hard to get
> passed the 'playing of the jazz'.

The info on configuring sound is here:

<http://www.terrasoftsolutions.com/support/solutions/ydl_4.0/audio.shtml>

Supposedly this is for YDL 4.0.1, but the website has it under "YDL 
4.0-4.0.1", so hopefully this should work in 4.0 as well.

> You get what you pay for ;-). Ubuntu has made some nice progress in
> that department though (and, maybe YDL 4.1 but I wouldn't know :-(,
> though I'm not sure Ubuntu plays well with OldWorld machines. 

Supposedly, Debian and Ubuntu are the only distributions that still work well 
(or at all) on Old World machines.

-PRH