No System Sounds

[fguy]

Greetings

I have debian lenny and I'm using a bare bones version of the gnome desktop.

I have an older Dell PIII 733, I haven't yet opened up the box to visually determine the type of sound card, but it seems from the Sound Preferences app that I have an Ensoniq PCI card.

I have installed the gnome-audio package which is supposed to provide system sounds.

In the sound preferences application, Devices Tab, I can successfully test Sound Events and Sound Playback, When I click the Test button with the green check mark I get a continuous tone through my speakers until I click OK to finish.

Under teh sounds tab, there are buttons to test the various system sounds. In this window the checkboxes for Enable software sound mixing( ESD) and Play System Sounds are selected. When I click the various buttons to test the sounds, everything "looks" ok, there are no error messages, but thee is no sound.

Not sure where to go from here, any suggestions are much appreciated.

Thanks.

[Bulkley]

Do you have alsa installed? If so, check alsamixer; you may have your speakers turned off.

[fguy]

Do you have alsa installed? If so, check alsamixer; you may have your speakers turned off.

Thanks. I didn't specifically install any alsa, but when I run the command dpkg --get-selections | grep alsa I see gstreamer0.10-alsa

I can tell you that under the Devices tab of sound preferences, When I test Sound playback using the ALSA selection I get a continuous sound that gets louder when I turn up the volume on my speakers.

[refracta]

be sure esound is intalled

[fguy]

OK, well after a little research I decided I would install alsa-base. Still no system sounds. I saw esound recomended in a few sites, I may yet get to that. But on a whim I decided to install grip cd-player, and I could listen to my CDs no problem. This was a bit of a surprise, I had figured no system sounds meant no music, but I guess not. Anyways, all I really wanted was music, that seems to be ok, so system sounds goes back on the shelf for now. Thanks anyways.

[refracta]

maybe you should of asked about music then....

[fguy]

maybe you should of asked about music then....

fair enough. Having been a Microsoft guy since the days of DOS, It's always been my habit to test system sounds with every new system i built, and if no system sounds then no other sound will happen either. And if system sounds work then so does everything else. I guess Linux ain't quite so cut and dry. I guess I'll find out soon enough whether I can play media files such as mp3, etc.

[dwflo]

New to Debian...this is my first post, so bear with me.

Just installed "Lenny" for amd64, and the drivers for the Soundblaster are not found with alsaconf.
Where do I get the drivers for my SB card? Looked for the drivers in the Debian repositories, but do not find what I need.

I have been using Fedora for a long time and have not had this sound problem before.

Any help would be appreciated.