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Topic: DSL and audio client

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JohnS

Group: Members
Posts: 23
Joined: Dec. 2004

Posted: Dec. 16 2004,00:04

I just found out about DSL a couple days ago and have been furiously getting to know it (to my wife's dismay !).

This all started because I am an audiophile trying to get the best possible sound from digital source. A bunch of us on other internet sites have been building our own DACs and have come to the conclusion that anything using S/PDIF as an input is compromised, we can get significantly better sound with a properly implemented USB DAC (unfortunately there are VERY few properly implemented USB DACs commercially available, so we make our own) Of course this means you need a compuetr to drive the USB DAC. We are looking at fanless no moving part simple machines that can access libraries of sound files over a network from big (possibly noisy) servers in another room.

The obvious choice is a mini-itx machine. I was over at solar-pc because they make such machines and ran across a version with DSL installed on a CF card. I had never heard of DSL before (well the transport mechanism, not the OS). But their picture of the DSL CD had the URL on it so I wound up over here.

DSL looked like exactly what I was looking for so I decided to try it out, burned a CD, booted from it and nothing, blank screen when X started. OK perusing here I find nVidia boards don't like xvesa. Tried fb mode, still blank screen. I tried every paramter I could find to boot:, still no luck. I finally got it down to my mouse! I was using a Wacom graphics tablet which it did NOT like. I put in a regular USB mouse and booted in fb1024x768 and I had a desktop!!

But no sound or network. I eventually found out I needed to run modprobe b44 to get the network to run. Things were much better now. I could access myDSL packaeges etc, but still no man pages, I get a no authorization message from lynx whenever I try and do a man. A little anoying, but with firefox running I could usually find the info I was after on the net.

Now to sound. I needed to get ALSA running (ALSA supprts the USB interfaces we are using for our DACs). So I tried the alsadeb.dsl package. After I got a couple other packages it needed I did the alsa install and got a message saying I already had a sound driver installed, which would cause a problem. So I tried rmmod on the existing driver, it didn't work becaue it was busy. (I still don't know why it was busy).

I tried loading the asla driver with modprobe, which worked, but I still get no sound from xmms, BUT I can cat a file to the /dev/ device and get sound out of the speakers, so it looks like the driver is working. It appears I need a special mixer: envy24control for my delta-44, I can find this in several places but I'm not quite sure how to get this installed on my DSL system.

So after all that LONG preamble I have a few real questions:

How do I load the ALSA drivers at boot time when I'm running off a live CD with no persistant store? The disks on the machine are ntfs which I can't write to from DSL. Is there somme command I can give at boot time that will let me grab the alsa drivers at boot time before the builtin drivers gets loaded? Or a way to prevent them from getting loaded at boot time? (the problem is that I have an onboard sound chip, but I want to use the delta-44 with alsa drivers instead)

I have an old smart card and USB reader I could use for save and restore across live CD sessions (its not big enough to put the whole DSL on), but can I tell DSL to use that for restore? And if I can, how do I set it up so alsa is on the smartcard to be used at boot time? Trying to figure out what files to put in filelist is going to be a nightmare with something as big and pervasive as alsa.

After I get all this running then I have to figure out how to make samba work so I can access the sound files from another machine.

Right now all I'm trying to do is get familaiar enough with DSL and running alsa in it so that I can determine if its going to work well as the OS for the itx audio client. I also need to find a good player to use, specifically something that can work well with large libraries of files off on servers. My intention is to have a 7" or so touch screen LCD monitor as the user interface for this. It would be really nice if I can find something that would show thumbnails of the CD covers, a number of the people involved in this project really want that.

Suming up, final product is itx system running off CF card, but for now I want to experiment using live CD before I start buying new hardware. BTW that 3677 case in your itx store is way cool, thats probably what I'll be using for this project.

I guess thats enough for one post.

John S.

cbagger01

Group: Members
Posts: 4264
Joined: Oct. 2003

Posted: Dec. 16 2004,01:38

If you go to the Damnsmalllinux.org web site, you can view the contents of the myDSL respository by clicking on the "mydsl repository is online" link.

In addition to seeing the myDSL extensions that are also listed inside the myDSL click-and-run GUI, you can read more information about each extension by clicking on the "info" link next to each filename.

Anyways, the alsadebs.dsl extension has an info file that describes how you can properly load the extension without running into driver conflicts. Check it out:

http://www.ibiblio.org/pub....bs.info

Also, if you want to build a custom dsl iso that includes the alsadebs.dsl extension, you can build one here:

http://www.nolifeline.com/mydslmkr.html

ke4nt1

Group: Members
Posts: 2329
Joined: Oct. 2003

Posted: Dec. 16 2004,03:36

Using the alsadebs.dsl package as instructed by cbagger01 in the .info file
works well with the delta 66 and 1010 series of soundcards.

I use them both daily in our facility, and can attest to their success.

I also use NVidia video cards with both 32 and 64MB versions of Gforce2
No issues with xvesa, and the performance is much better using xvesa.

Try booting with the vga=normal string in your boot commands.

All of your settings can be placed in your backup for your
netcard config, and your other hardware and shares to bootup nicely
and automatic.

The samba.dsl file is the one you want for connectivity to your windows shares.
It can also autorun after bootup , and mount shares automatically as well...

So, I'd burn a copy of DSL from the .iso using a multisession burn mode,
leaving the disc open ..

Than burn a second session on the same CD, with these .dsl files in the
root of the second session.

samba.dsl
alsadebs.dsl
gnu-utils.dsl
dsl-dpkg.dsl

Your system will have all your apps loaded and ready to run at startup.
Placing the configs in your bootlocal.sh will autoload the nic stuff.
ex. --> modprobe b44

73
ke4nt

JohnS
Unregistered

Posted: Dec. 16 2004,10:08

Thanks for the replies. I did get the alsadeb to load correctly. I didn't realize you coul duse the boot: dsl alsa command with the live CD, I was under the impression that it needed the alsa libs to be already loaded at boot time, at least thats what I got from the warning message when loading the dsl.

Part of the problem is that when you are in the myDSL click list, the the info link for alsadeb comes back with a file not found. From the home page myDSL online link its there, but from the desktop click on myDSL its not.

Anyway it loads, but only works with OSS mode from xmms. I always get a busy device message when I try and use the also plugin for xmms. I tried the default and all kinds of specific devices such as plughw:0,0 etc. The asound files say its detected the hardware as card0 device 0, sub 0 so plughw:0,0 should work but it doesn't. Anyway at least I got sound coming out using OSS mode.

On the video front, nothingI do with xvesa works, just a blank screen, I tried all the vga= modes and none work. fb1024x768 DOES work so I'm sticking with that for now.

This week end I might try making my own custom CD with alsa, xmms and the config files setup to load it all at boot. That will be fun to try and figure out how to do that.

On the original front, I've been looking around and it seems that slimserver might be a good way to do the remote audio file management. And you could use a squeezebox in those rooms that you don't really need the ultimate infidelity. The mini-itx DSL system becomes sort of a super squeezebox.

Am I having fun yet? You BET!

John S.

JohnS
Unregistered

Posted: Dec. 20 2004,20:54

I got things working much better now. The multisession boot disk works great on my big computer, I can put as many DSL apps in there as I want and they load at boot time. Unfortunately it does NOT work on the laptop, it will not boot from the multisesion, just the singlesession CD.

On the sound front with alsadebs in there at boot time everything work great. The ALSA driver on the delta-44 really sounds GOOD, for some reason it sounds better than it does in XP.

The one problem I have is getting the wireless LAN to work on the laptop. It says it has a prism pci builtin, at bootup the orinoco suite is installed but does not work (of course not, I don't have the SSID and WEP key at that point). I tried ebery configuration utility I could find and got it to work ONCE, now I can't get it to work again. If I rmmod the orinoco drivers I can get the prism2_pci drivers to load (which are wlan drivers) and use the prism2 script which uses wlan tools, but still no connection. I'm kind of stumped on that for now. The Wlan stuff thinks its all working, just no connection. Wired works fine straight off the CD.

For the sound app I'm running slimsever and softsqueeze, I don't even need samba, the slimserver does the reading of the audio files and sends it to softueeze over the LAN quite nicely. Slimserver has a nice web interface which lets you control the player remotely, dillo or firefox work well for this, they even have a skin for the web interface optimized for small touchscreen displays like I was thinking of using for this. Softqueez is written in java so I did need to load the java dsl, thats BIG for DSL packages!

At this point I'm ready to put together the real hardware and find out outwhat I need to do for IT!

BTW you guys now have me right clicking on the windows desktop!

John S.

12 replies since Dec. 16 2004,00:04

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