The problem I observed is that running "sndconfig" to configure the soundblaster didn't finish properly. It would play the linux.au sample properly but choke on the sample midi file. Canceling and rebooting resulted in sound initilization failures. The root cause seems to be that pnpdump doesn't recognize all the io ports for the Soundblaster wavetable device. In the kernel source documentation in file /usr/src/linux/Documentation/sound/AWE32 it shows how to resolve this by modifying the resulting /etc/isapnp.conf file. > Then WaveTable goes. For some reason Plug-n-Play detects only one I/O port,but the wavetable needs THREE! My working string is: > "(CONFIGURE CTL044/1132685 (LD 2 (IO 0 (BASE 0x0620)) > (IO 1 (BASE 0x0A20)) (IO 2 (BASE 0x0E20)) (ACT Y) ))" > Resources 0x0620, 0x0A20 and 0x0E20 should work. Other on-board devices: Gameport and StereoEnhance are not required to be inited. So in short, I run "sndconfig" as normal, then exit on failure and edit the /etc/isapnp.conf file as above. Then on reboot everything works great. Also, from browsing the isapnptools homepage, I think this problem is a bug in pnpdump as there was a patch there which seems related to this problem. However I have not tried recompliling isapnptools yet as the current solution seems to work for me.
sndconfig should be doing that automatically ; it does it on all the AWE cards we have. What does the output of 'pnpdump' say on your system? Perhaps the card's description isn't something that's recognized as an AWE card...
OK, it didn't recognized the AWE line because it didn't specify 0x620 as the IO port... fixed in sndconfig-0.34-6, which will be in the next Raw Hide release.