no ALSA sound in 2.6 on Intel 82801CA-ICH3 - OSS works

I'm a bit ashamed about posting this, but I couldn't find anyone with
a similar problem googling. I admit up front that I'm ALSA-ignorant so this could well be a silly configuration issue...

This is a Dell Latitude C640 with

00:1f.5 Multimedia audio controller: Intel Corp. 82801CA/CAM AC'97 Audio (rev 02)

I tried using ALSA in kernel or modular, but the three apps I use
(xmms, xine and gmplayer) all report -ENODEV on /dev/dsp. This is /var/log/messages with in-kernel ALSA:

Dec 28 10:53:41 incident kernel: Advanced Linux Sound Architecture Driver Version 0.9.7 (Thu Sep 25 19:16:36 2003 UTC).
Dec 28 10:53:41 incident kernel: intel8x0: clocking to 48000
Dec 28 10:53:41 incident kernel: ALSA device list:
Dec 28 10:53:41 incident kernel:   #0: Intel 82801CA-ICH3 at 0xd800, irq 11

and the card appears to be properly detected under /proc/asound; this is the output when loaded as modular:

[asuardi@incident asound]$ ls
card0 cards devices I82801CAICH3 oss pcm timers version [asuardi@incident asound]$ cat devices
0: [0- 0]: ctl
25: [0- 1]: digital audio capture
16: [0- 0]: digital audio playback
24: [0- 0]: digital audio capture
33: : timer
[asuardi@incident asound]$ cat pcm
00-00: Intel ICH : Intel 82801CA-ICH3 : playback 1 : capture 1
00-01: Intel ICH - MIC ADC : Intel 82801CA-ICH3 - MIC ADC : capture 1 [asuardi@incident asound]$ cat timers
G0: system timer : 1000.000us (10000000 ticks)
G1: RTC timer : 976.562us (100000000 ticks)
P0-0-0: PCM playback 0-0-0 : SLAVE
P0-0-1: PCM capture 0-0-1 : SLAVE
P0-1-1: PCM capture 0-1-1 : SLAVE
[asuardi@incident asound]$ cat version
Advanced Linux Sound Architecture Driver Version 0.9.7 (Thu Sep 25 19:16:36 2003 UTC). Compiled on Jan 3 2004 for kernel 2.6.1-rc1.

Using i810_audio from OSS just works; in 2.4 I've always been
using OSS successfully, ALSA never worked in any 2.5.x I've tried.

Thanks in advance,

--alessandro

"Immagina intensamente e vedrai
dove gli altri pensano che non ci sia niente"
(Cristina Dona', "Salti nell'aria")

[snipped the /proc/asound details]

And it was; thanks to Gunther Sohler who tipped me the right way I
installed the software I was missing (alsa-lib, alsa-driver and alsa-tools plus the xmms-alsa plugin), unmuted the audio channels by means of alsamixer (*the* problem - somehow the channels are muted by default), set volume for what I use and now xine/xmms play audio fine.

As a bonus I cleared my mind about a few differences between ALSA
and OSS :)

Sorry for the waste of bandwidth and thanks again,

--alessandro

"Immagina intensamente e vedrai
dove gli altri pensano che non ci sia niente"
(Cristina Dona', "Salti nell'aria")