I just installed Mandrake 10.1 and I have an onboard sound card and also a PCI one. I want to use the PCI one, but Mandrake has defaulted to the onboard. How do I switch which one it uses?

You can't disable the onboard via a jumper, or the Bios Setup page?

Yeah, its already disabled in the BIOS. I had to do that for Windows. But for some reason Linux is still using it.

Quote: Original post by oconnellseanm
Yeah, its already disabled in the BIOS. I had to do that for Windows. But for some reason Linux is still using it.

It's due to the fact that Linux is independent of BIOS. Linux checks everything itself and takes all the functionality of BIOS. Only thing that currently comes to my mind is to run drakconf and in a hardware list you should configure ALSA (emu10k1) driver for your slot sound card. I think that having done this should automatically disable on-bourd sound, but I'm not sure about this. Give it a try and see.

Linux is not independent of the BIOS, and in most cases, disabling something in the BIOS will prevent Linux from using it.

Linux does use PnP to find devices... if disabling the device in the BIOS does not remove it from PnP, it will still be found by Linux.

Perhaps disabling it in the BIOS just stops resource allocation to it - in which case Linux might (unhelpfully) allocate its resources itself (although I didn't think it did that usually).

The obvious way to do it is to remove the driver for the device from Linux's list of drivers it loads / checks at startup. I have no idea how to do this under Mandrake (drakconf sounds promising though).

The only problem arises if the onboard and PCI cards use the same driver - if that is the case, some jiggery-pokery will be required.

Mark