Surround Sound doesn't work, only 2 channels.

English Hardware
1

I’m on OpenSuse 11.1 KDE 4.2.2, and I can’t get surround sound to work. Whenever I login to my system I get an error saying something along the lines of “ALSA/oss sound does not work, falling back to default,” and I think this is the problem. I’m using a logitech 5.1 speakers that’s plugged into the speaker, mic, and auxilary input plugs at the back of the computer – and I say this because I have no information about my sound card.

My computer specs are: sony vaio vgc rb-30, 512 MB ram, pentium 4 @ 3ghz processor, integrated gma graphics.

I typed this into the terminal
“speaker-test -Dplug:surround51 -c6 -twav”
and I get an error saying that it’s buisy.

2

Anyone? I read the guide (don’t have a link to it now) for troubleshooting audio configuration problems, but that was no help…

3

I wrote the troubleshooting guide. Its for basic sound problems (not for 5.1). I do not have a 5.1 system, I have no 5.1 experience, so I can not help.

4

If it were me with a new 5.1 system that I could not get to work, I would install the program “xchat” and using xchat I would go to IRC freenode channel #alsa and ask the guru’s there for help. One may have to do that 1/2 dozen times at different times of the day, before one finally gets the help they need.

5

Swee-hee-eet! Thanks, I’m going to ask those guys for help and post my results here :slight_smile:

6

Did you have any luck?

I purchased a 5.1 surround sound system yesterday, … and I also went to IRC freenode #alsa to get some “tuning” advice. I posted my experiences here: Exploring surround sound in Linux - openSUSE Forums