[gentoo-user] ff & chromium trapped in deafness or how to configure ALSA correctly

[Maximilian Bräutigam]

Hello all,

I recently bought a Zotac Barebone ZBOX HD-AD02 AMD E-350 and installed
Gentoo on it, what is working more or less very well except the sound. I
did everything according to gentoo and gentoowiki docs, I installed (due
to laziness) a gentoo-sources kernel with genkernel and Sabayon linux
standard configuration, and I am using pulseaudio, but when I launch
firefox or chromium from console and play some sounds, I get lots of
these error messages:

"ALSA lib pcm_dmix.c:1018:(snd_pcm_dmix_open) unable to open slave"

I already googled for it but didn't find something helpful. The Zbox has
a HDMI and a standard device:

# lspci -v | grep -i audio
00:01.1 Audio device: ATI Technologies Inc Device 1314
00:14.2 Audio device: ATI Technologies Inc SBx00 Azalia (Intel HDA) (rev 40)

# cat /proc/asound/cards
 0 [Generic        ]: HDA-Intel - HD-Audio Generic
                      HD-Audio Generic at 0xfeb44000 irq 40
 1 [SB             ]: HDA-Intel - HDA ATI SB
                      HDA ATI SB at 0xfeb40000 irq 16

You can find the complete alsa-info output at
http://paste.pocoo.org/show/461744/

For me, the interesting part is this section:

**** List of PLAYBACK Hardware Devices ****
card 0: Generic [HD-Audio Generic], device 3: HDMI 0 [HDMI 0]
  Subdevices: 1/1
  Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 1: SB [HDA ATI SB], device 0: ALC892 Analog [ALC892 Analog]
  Subdevices: 1/1
  Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 1: SB [HDA ATI SB], device 1: ALC892 Digital [ALC892 Digital]
  Subdevices: 1/1
  Subdevice #0: subdevice #0

Is is possible that ff and chromium are sending data to HDMI since it is
card 0? If you think, it would be helpful to disable card 0 or change
the order, please tell me how to do it?

I highly appreciate all kinds of help!

Kind regards,
der Max