[LAU] disabled onboard soundcard - uninstall drivers?

[david]

Erik Steffl wrote:
> Roger E wrote:
>> Ludo Beckers wrote:
>>> (Ubuntu Hardy)
>>> Having problems with my new soundcard Audigy (Creative Soundblaster) 
>>> with recording through the microphone. Playback for .wav, ogg, etc. 
>>> works good.
>>> I can't record in Sound Recorder nore Audacity nore use it with Skype.
>>>
>>> The Volume Control is a mystery to me because there are too many 
>>> strange meaningless names (LFE and "front end" and much more).
> 
>    SB live and audigy (AFAIK those are fairly similar in this regard,
> only have experience with SB live) have horribly complicated and
> undocumented mixers, you essentially never know what are they doing,
> seems like everything changes everythings,
> 
>    searching the net provides some answers but theer's still lot of
> playing around and trying involved,
> 
>    LFE is low frequency e?, i.e. subwoofer,
> 
>    Master only controls front speakers (plus center, don't remember),
> 
>    PCM: seems to control front speakers
> 
>    Surround: rear speakers (but does nothing)
> 
>    Center: is center (but does nothing)
> 
>    Synth: onboard synth (midi)
> 
>    Wave, WaveCenter, Wave LFE, Wave Surround: essentially same as the
> ones without Wave in the name but different, they actually change volume
> 
>     SB Live Analog/Digital Output Jack: switches between digital and
> analog output (off for analog?)
> 
>     Sigmatel 4-Speaker Stereo: not sure what this means exactly, it
> changes what other controls do a bit, probably changes the card from
> being 5.1 channel to be essentially 2 channel then splitting that into 4
> channels for output
> 
>    Sigmatel Surround: not sure what this does
> 
>    The above of course depends on million other things, how you define
> your alsa device etc.
> 
>    Ignore if audugy is actually significantly different :-)
> 
>>> I disabled the onboard soundcard in the BIOS, but read something on 
>>> Google about disabling the drivers for it too might be a good idea.
>>>
>>> How do I find which and where those drivers are? and does it make a 
>>> difference uninstalling them?
> 
>    two options - if they are build into kernel you need to rebuild
> kernel (unlikely with modern distros), otherwise just ignore, they will
> most likely not be loaded (because the card is not there, it's just like
> for 100s other cards that are not there), you can use lsmod to figure
> out which modules are loaded,

Hmmm, on my server box, which has some onboard sound card built in and 
another PCI-based soundcard I added to it, I disabled the onboard sound 
in the BIOS - but Linux still finds it and installs the ALSA driver for 
it. (One of the reasons why I haven't got sound working on the server, I 
think.) I've been told by someone else that Linux doesn't pay attention 
to the BIOS once it begins to boot, but what do I know?

-- 
David
gnome at hawaii.rr.com
authenticity, honesty, community