Multimedia :: disappearing sound



Quote (nroza @ April 24 2006,15:01)
Anywho, to the topic at hand, my frugal install was not indentical to the live CD. By way of proof I offer precious little besides my account of clicking on *.pls links in firefox before and after the install in question. I have every confidence that DSL does its best to assure every frugal install is as faithful as possible to the CD. I also have every confidence that if I weren't so overworked/tired/ignorant/lazy I could track down the misconfiguration responsible, but alas, I am a college student.

Ben thar, dun that.
Well, let's get started, and figure it out.
My current configuration, that I am probably overly proud of, is a Frugal-GRUB install of DSL-2.3 on a compact disk that's running in a CF to IDE adapter hooked to a mini-itx mainboard inside a kid-sized metal lunchbox. This is a project that has really gotten the ideas flowing for me. The music works great on it, so maybe I can help.
Dude... For real?? You have the time and wherewithal to help a stranger with configuration issues? If so, then I have sorely misjudged open source forums as a whole. Okay, Okay... lets!

The machine in question is a lovely, enormous Gateway G6-300 circa 1998. The chip is a slot Pentium 2 of heretofore unknown clockspeed. I am almost positive that this:

http://froogle.google.com/froogle....d&hl=en

is the motherboard. The sound is integrated on the mobo... I only mention this in case I have to go driver- or firmware-hunting.

Looking forward to your reply!
Most of us who try to help are good guys as long as we don't get mistreated by our adoring public first. We do this for nothing, so don't push it. I almost missed your last post because it passed out of the cache before I even saw it. No doubt you would have been pissed if I never again responded, even though it wouldn't have been my fault. At least that's been the response of some others here lately.

OK, The good thing is that your hardware is old. The Linux 2.4 kernel supports old hardware very well.
The bad thing is...your hardware is old. There can be any number of things blocking the flow of a bit or byte here and there. For example: boards or cables that aren't fully seated anymore or have slightly corroded connectors, crud covering the laser diode in the CDROM drive, a servo in the drive with a rusty brush, jelly donuts crammed in the floppy, etc.

As I said before, what goes on the hard drive in a frugal install *should be* the same as what's on the CDROM. If the sound works when you use the CD, then there's no reason it wouldn't work with the frugal HD install unless there was some quirky thing that burped when you were installing. On the same machine, if you boot with the CD, do you get the sound back?
I knew it was going to be a struggle with old hardware, but I didn't even consider some of the "corroded connector" stuff you mentioned. If I told you that I want to ressurrect this box as a dedicated streaming audio player with almost nothing else, would you tell me that I'm wasting my time?
I think it may be worth it, but you will need to open the case and check everything. I always do that with older computers. I open it up, pull everything out and then put it back together.
The other thing I was thinking is, if you have more than 128MB of RAM, and the CDROM is working OK, then you really don't even need to install it to the hard drive to make it work for your application. Just run it with the boot option dsl toram and away you go.
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