After I'd installed and configured antiX (Edelweißpiraten, full, icewm/rox) everything was fine with the sound, music and video. I installed xnoise and deadbeef music player (and removed xmms) and they worked too. Then I delivered the notebook back to its owner and after some days sound suddently stopped working.

No, he didn't install anything else, no dist-upgrades, nothing (he even doesn't know how to do it) and the notebook still runs on originally installed kernel 3.5. The only things he did was plugging in an ethernet cable (I used it with wireless), then switching back to wireless and plugging in an external USB-HDD to watch some videos stored there...

The notebook has a SiS SI7012 soundchip, also an internal SiS modem. Alsamixer shows me three entries with F6, default, 0 SiS SI7012 and 1 the modem. No matter what I choose there is no sound. All mixers a fully drawn up.

The hardware sound wheel is turned on to maximum.

When I open the deadbeef music player it offers me a little more configuration than alsamixer, it shows me a list of: Default, SiS Si7012 Default Audio Device, SiS SI7012 Front speakers, SiS SI7012 4.1 Surround, SiS SI 7012 5.0 Surround, SiS SI7012 5.1 Surround and SiS SI7012 IEC958 (S/PDIF) Digital Audio Output.

When I choose the last one (S/PDIF) sound works fine in deadbeef. Still I have no sound in other applications where I cannot choose those channels (gnome media player e.g.). I know that the VLC media player also offers to choose from those channels so I'll try to install that too when I get my hands on the laptop again.

BUT it would be much better if I could find a way to set the sound to that S/PDIF channel globally so that gnome media player and xnoise also work. But how do I do that?? And why did it suddenly change? I don't know if the default sound once was that S/PDIF and now the software switched to something else of if it was something else and now the hardware switched to s/PDIF.... __{{emoticon}}__

Alas I cannot give more details because the laptop and its owner are out of reach, he doesn't have internet either. But he needs the sound on the notebook so I have to"dummy explain" it on the phone and maybe send him an USB stick with additional files and a very good step by step explanantion what to do...

Maybe a sound key like on my IBM laptops was hit inadvertently maybe?

Maybe... I don't know if the notebook has something like that...

But nonetheless: How do I tell antiX that it shall not use sis7012 (Analog) as default but sis7012 S/PDIF (Digital Audio) instead when alsamixer only offers sis7012 in general? With KDE, Phonon and systemsettings that would be no problem to change, there you can easily choose the output of the card...

spacepenguin wrote:Maybe... I don't know if the notebook has something like that...

But nonetheless: How do I tell antiX that it shall not use sis7012 (Analog) as default but sis7012 S/PDIF (Digital Audio) instead when alsamixer only offers sis7012 in general? With KDE, Phonon and systemsettings that would be no problem to change, there you can easily choose the output of the card...

Look at the F3 key in alsamixer is all I can think of.

I had the opposite problem, alsa would not mute, and when I turned the volume all the way down I still had sound coming from the speakers. Not all the speaker channels was showing in the mixer ether.
What I did to fix the problem was reinstall everything for alsa except the volume icon. It was a misconfirgeration from the default install. But I have NVIDIA MCP51 High Definition Audio.
I don't know how you would get a misconfiguration. . I would try a reinstall of the sound drivers, and alsa,.just to see what happens.