Moi!

Quote Originally Posted by aay
In additon to your SB live does your Dell happen to have on board sound?
No, I don't think so (Dell Dimension 8250 in original configuration.)

Quote Originally Posted by aay
If so, disable it in your bios.
No setting for this available. I also read elsewhere that one should set "PnP O/S" to "no" in the BIOS. The problem is, however, that the Dell BIOS (A01) settings menu is very minimalistic and does not offer any PnP related settings at all.

Quote Originally Posted by aay
Apart from that you could also try using the alsa cheat code when you boot.
I tried that also, and to me, it looks like everything goes just fine:
From the startup messages:
Code:
. . .
Soundcard: driver=ALSA(autodetect)
 . . 
Preparing modules for alsa...
Building card database..
Configuring emu10k1...
Running update-modules...
Creating snddevices...
Setting default volumes...
. . .
insmod: Note: /etc/modules.conf is more recent than /lib/modules/extra/modules.dep
(Don't know if that insmod Note is relevant; it comes up during startup and after shutdown.)

So it seems the sound card is set up as emu10k1 (as it should, I think?), but still keeps quiet.
E.g. nothing from XMMS: song title (just the demo piece) is displayed, but no sound. Strangely, the time count does not proceed either, so I am not quite sure if XMMS is or is not at least "thinking" it's playing.

What next???

Thanks for the help so far,
greetings,
Martin