Fedora (10) ca0106 Audigy SE sound card working with 5.1

Today I installed Fedora 10 on my desktop. I need to spend some months working with Fedora to prepare for my Red Hat Certified Engineer exam which I will hopefully take this summer.

I immediately had sound problems.  Luckily, I was able to refer to my old posting from one year ago for the fix.  This is just an edited version of that post.

My desktop is currently using the Creative Audigy SE sound card (ca0106) which can be very un-Linux friendly.  As I mentioned 9 months ago, I was able to get sound from my front 3 speakers but I wanted all 5 speakers to work as well (5.1).

With Arch Linux and Gentoo Linux, I was able to get surround sound on all five speakers with the following .asoundrc file and saved it to my /home directory:

pcm.!dmix {
type plug
slave {
pcm surround51
channels 6
}
}
pcm.!default {
type plug
slave.pcm “dmix”
slave.channels 6
route_policy duplicate
}

With Fedora, similarly to Ubuntu, I was not getting surround sound with the above file.

I remembered that I needed to add the following to /etc/pulse/default.pa:

load-module module-alsa-sink device=”surround51″ channels=6 sink_name=sur51

Still, no surround sound.  Then I reread my old post and realized that I needed to add the entire contents of .asoundrc to /etc/asound.conf as well to make the settings system wide.

I rebooted and got all 5 speakers to work.  Thank God for old posts 🙂