PPC: Sound on PowerMacs

Support knowledgebase (olh_ppc_sound)
Applies to

SuSE Linux: Versions 6.4 to 7.0
This article refers to an older version of SuSE Linux. Therefore some of the informations given in this article may be outdated or the article may contain stale links.

Kernel: Versions since 2.2.14

You want to activate the onboard sound. Under SuSE Linux 6.4 PPC and SuSE Linux 7.0 PPC this should be normaly done during installation with YAST2. If this fails for any reason or you have installed with YAST1, the following should help you:

Load the sound driver "dmasound.o" with the command

su -c /sbin/insmod dmasound

Test with the following command whether the Loadng was successfull:

play /opt/kde/share/sounds/ktalkd.wav

If you can hear the Bell everything worked fine ;-)

To make this work all times, please edit the file /etc/modules.conf with the Editor of your choice:

You find in the beginning of /etc/modules.conf the following:

#*****************************************************************************
alias char-major-14 off
alias sound off
alias midi off
#*****************************************************************************

Change these three Lines by placing a hash at the beginning of every line.

#*****************************************************************************
# alias char-major-14 off
# alias sound off
# alias midi off
#*****************************************************************************

Add now the following lines:

#*****************************************************************************
alias char-major-14 dmasound
alias sound dmasound
alias midi dmasound
alias sound-slot-0 dmasound
alias sound-service-0-0 dmasound
alias sound-service-0-3 dmasound
#*****************************************************************************

Save this file now. From now, the sound should work all the time.

Specials:

Some Macs are using USB-Sound (i.e. Cube), in this case use audio instead of dmasound.

On some machines the internal Speaker is not supported yet, i.e. G3 B&W. In this case use external Boxes.

On the most recent machines possibly the playback of Audio CD's is not possible. At least it is not possible to use the KDE CD-Player. In cases like this use xmms, to be executed as root like this:

xmms /dev/hdc

Please check the Name of the Device (hdc is only an example) and change it to your System accordingly.

If other users should also be able to hear CD's, you have to change the Rights of the Device:

chmod 666 /dev/hdc

Or add the User with YAST1 to the Group disk.

Please do not use the Controllcenter of KDE for Soundtesting, because the Sound Support of KDE on PPC is buggy at the moment.


Keywords: PPC, POWERPC, APPLE, MAC, MACINTOSH, SOUND

Categories: Power PC

SDB-olh_ppc_sound, Copyright SuSE Linux AG, Nürnberg, Germany - Version: 25. Jun 2000
SuSE Linux AG - Last generated: 21. Mai 2001 by olh (sdb_gen 1.40.0)