Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

[ge0rg]

Hello there,
I am pretty new to linux. I installed lucid puppy 5.2.8 on my netbook in order to get it running smoothly and it does an amazing job so far.
Now I have one major problem: I have an external sound card, a fast track pro.
It does not work. I tried it on Ubuntu and there it worked, I just had to choose it in the sound menu. Now in puppy I am able to choose it in the alsamixer, but nothing happens, and as soon as I reopen the mixer, it is switched back.
I dont require the input working, just the output.
Also, it would be nice to be able to switch between the internal and the external cards easily.
Thanks in advance.
PS: Does anybody know an easy was to get puppy booting without the grub menu appearing?

[don570]

You set the time for your grub message in the menu.lst file
http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/ubuntu/change-the-grub-menu-timeout-on-ubuntu/

Where it's located varies .
( apparently grub and grub4dos install it slightly differently).

Use pfind to search for it . In my grub4dos installation it's
at the upper level of the partition rather than /boot/grub/menu.lst

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As far as USB microphones in Lucid Puppy are concerned,
if you're having problems I would suggest installing the
latest version of AUDACITY

because it has a special way of using alsa (the linux sound driver)

Experiment with the source of sound which is easy to do
with audacity. There is a menu in the preferences.
Sometimes it can be set in the front window.

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[don570]

Note that Slacko Puppy supports the latest stable version of audacity
that appears to have improved in how it
recognizes devices and cards.

http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=75783

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[Smithy]

Hi geOrg,

Playdayz three headed dog has alsa 1.024, which has improvements for usb
audio, fastrack, rme cards, emu, maudio.

Successfully running Audacity at 24 bit 44.1khz and 48khz, rock solid thru usb, recording and playback.

You will need Jack for Ardour, which runs great on THD.



I put together a little recording rig based on THD. Wine based stuff, but Audacity and Ardour native are working well with it.

http://www.smokey01.com/Smithy/music2go.iso

http://musicjam.drivehq.com/

Puppy Studio is the creme de la creme, has a realtime kernel, but the alsa might not help with the usb sound cards, but you might be lucky with it.

And Dark City is working some black magic on a QT puppy to get QTraktor
going, that should be interesting.

P.S, does anyone know of a little laptop battery meter PET compatible with luci? Maybe with bars on it for battery life, but anything will do..

[ge0rg]

Thnaks alot for the answers, unfortunateley I am not at home now, but when I get there, I'll try those things out.
If Audacity gets my soundcard to work inside audacity, will it also work outside Audacity then?

Concerning that grub thing. This is exaclty what I tried out. just removing the '#' before the tmeout entry and setting a value (I set it to 30 for testing). But strangeley, puppy does not shut down then. It just starts doing so and then the desktop reappears quite fast, it does not do a reboot. I don't now exactly what is going on though...I have to shut it down by force, and when I do, the timer works fine. But shutdown still does not work.

[don570]

[don570]

you should describe your boot problem to shinobar
since he's the expert in how to start up and shutdown a computer.

You should give the puppy version and a description of
the problem here...

http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=51697

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[Smithy]

Audacity won't GET your soundcard working as such, it is an application.
It's down to the drivers and the scripts as far as I can tell.
And the drivers are to do with the kernel and the
Advanced Linux Sound Architecture. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Linux_Sound_Architecture.

So if you get the ALSA working correctly, then yes other applications should work fine with your card.

Would be nice if there was an audio guru on the puppy linux forum who could run through where those scripts live, and how they can be edited to fix things up if necessary.
But hopefully the ALSA Wizard should get you up and running, it's in the tab, setup puppy on the menu.

[don570]

The Alsa people have written their own application to access the driver,
but I find that Audacity does a better job often.

...but retrovol is very good as well and Jemimah's Saluki is using
some lxde code that worked for me as well.

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[ge0rg]

Hi,
Now, I have tested the suggestion with audacity. And indeed, it worked. Inside Audacity. Even record worked, wich is great, but outside Audacity the soundcard is not recognized correctly. The gnome mixer litsts it as "Usb device" without any controls (not even volume) available. the alsa mixer lists it as "fast track pro" but no controls are available, and if chosen it has no effect and changes back when I start the mixer again.
Alsa wizard does not make it better, it doesnt recognize the card under its correct name, bus says that it is installing the drive. The playback of the sondsample does not work after the "installation" and it says something like "device not found".
Since everything works just fine inside Audacity, there must be a way getting it to work outside, right? But how...

[don570]

You'll have to experiment with various settings of alsamixer or retrovol.

Read the retrovol thread. Maybe there's a newer version of retrovol
that will work better.

Linux is a 'free' operating system
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[ge0rg]

Hmm...the probem is, that tere are no settings to mess around with, or what do you mean? In the mixer, there are no options for the "usb device".
As for retrovol, I tried to use it before I started this thread and it seems that I messed it up somehow. I now says when I try to start it "Invalid CTL FastTrack Pro"...

[don570]

I don't use alsamixer much but isn't there an F-key
that you press to get a list of cards or devices.

Look at the top of window carefully for the F-key

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[ge0rg]

Yes I know. It lists my onboard card and the fast track one. If I choose fast track pro, there are no preferences I can make, and sond still doesn't work. When I restart the mixer, it changes back to the onboard card.