disabling sound

[chadm1967]

Hi all,

I just installed Linux on my laptop and I'm having a few issues with the soundcard. Until I get that worked out, how can I disable the sound (or at least turn the volume all the way down)? All I'm getting is static and it's about to drive me crazy. I'm running Mandrake 8.2 with XFce as the window manager.

Thanks.

[pbharris]

hello,
remove the driver(s) from the running kernel is one way - rmmod module_name . any way would be to ahve a mixer proggie be run on startup and have it mute the output. i use wmix, a window maker app but runs very nicely under fvwm.

[njcajun]

hehe....

find the device that apps like xmms deliver sound to. On my redhat 7.3 laptop, it's '/dev/dsp'. Here's what I tested:

(as root)

# mv /dev/dsp /dev/dsp.bak
# ln -s /dev/null /dev/dsp

That stopped xmms from letting any sound out. I dunno about stuff like KDE - I half suspect you're embarrassed by the obnoxious startup sounds in KDE. That can be disabled somewhere in kde, but I don't remember where.

[njcajun]

for the record -unloading the modules as previously mentioned is really the proper way to do this. Also check your /etc/modules.conf file and make sure they're not gonna be loaded again when you reboot.

Also, if you use my idea, DON'T remove dsp, because it's actually a character device, and if you're kinda new you don't really wanna mess around with devices in general too much, and you certainly don't wanna have to debug in there and know what 'major and minor' numbers in that directory mean

Just move it sideways, as my example shows, then, when you wanna enable it again, you can just remove the link, and then move /dev/dsp.bak back to /dev/dsp.