Creative Vibra 128 Sound Card under Linux
Much to my surprise and frustration, I found that my Creative Vibra 128 sound card does not work under some newer distributions of Linux. This document explains how to fix the problem.
The Problem
The card shows up in my lspci output as follows:
0000:00:0f.0 Multimedia audio controller: Creative Labs Ectiva EV1938
Personally, I have seen the problem in Ubuntu Dapper Drake and Xandros 3.0: If you try to play music in XMMS, you can see the visualization bars pumping, but there is no sound at all.
I googled for solutions; apparently, lots of people have this sound card and cannot get it to work. Even the distros they report problematic are wide-ranging: Fedora Core, MEPIS, Ubuntu, Xandros, Linspire... Where I found a "solution", it was juvenile: "check if your speaker is muted in the mixer software". Of course it's not! And still I don't get as much as a whimper from my speakers!
The Solution
Perhaps the problem is in the new ALSA drivers (snd_ens1371) for this card. So I switched to the OSS driver (es1371), and sound plays fine. (OSS is deprecated over ALSA, but ironically, that's what works here.)
Under Xandros, these are the steps I followed. I think they will work for Ubuntu and probably other distros too.
- Move /etc/modules/alsa-base and /etc/modules/sound to ~/tmp
- Add a line es1371 to /etc/modules
- Reboot
The first step looks ugly, but I don't know of anything better yet. Happy Linuxing!
Update 28/Nov/2007: Marcel M. Cary wrote to me saying you can do dpkg-reconfigure linux-sound-base on Debian-based distributions instead of the steps above.
This file created: 01/Apr/2006