Couple weeks ago I upgraded my mothers computer from Microsoft XP to Linux Debian Lenny (testing). Everything is working except sound with pogo.com java games. After couple weeks searching for a fix and reading ALSA documention and tinkering around.

the problematic soundcard is

$ lspci
...
00:11.5 Multimedia audio controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT8233/A/8235/8237 AC97 Audio Controller (rev 70)
...

This is what I ended up with to get the sound to work with the pogo.com java games. First I created the ~/.asoundrc file, and this what I added to the ~/.asoundrc file.

!defaults.pcm.card 0
defaults.ctl.card 0
defaults.pcm.device 0
defaults.pcm.subdevice -1
defaults.pcm.dmix.device defaults.pcm.device
defaults.pcm.dsnoop.device defaults.pcm.device

After saving the file we have to restart ALSA

# /etc/init.d/alsa-utils restart
Shutting down ALSA…done.
Setting up ALSA…done.

Note: this fix may not work for everyone.

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This entry was posted on Monday, September 22nd, 2008 at 8:21 and is filed under Debian, Gnome, Hardware, Howto, Linux.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.