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Topic: No Sound, How do I get linux to recognize my sound

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kejava

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Posts: 10
Joined: Dec. 2007

Posted: April 28 2008,15:15

thanks curaga. You're right there is some kind of probe utility for the ISA bus. Looks like the originall probe utility was called "sndconfig". Then when things went from OSS to ALSA, they integrated it into "alsaconf" and/or "alsawizard" ... maybe? Since DSL is using OSS, it looks like much of what is needed is bundled in the isapnptools package. Now, to figure out how to get it into DSL.

I'm a bit confused about the differences between some of the interfaces I've found. There are PnP and non-PnP ISA devices. I recall non-PnP ISA from the good old days of using jumpers to set the I/O address and IRQ values. In those cases, you simply set those values as parameters during a modprobe. But then there's the non-PnP ISA devices ... I believe their values are burned to flash memory on the card. Since my sound card is on a laptop, there are no jumpers but I can configure the card from the BIOS. I'm not sure if this means it's PnP or non-PnP. Seems there could be a different way of probing depending upon that.

I found some useful old information here if anyone is trying to track similar info.

curaga

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Joined: Feb. 2007

Posted: April 28 2008,15:40

Unfortunately being able to configure an ISA card from bios on a laptop tells nothing of it's plug-and-play abilities.

There are two main compiling extensions, gcc1-with-libs.unc and compile-3.3.5.uci, if you wish to compile the app yourself

edit: Juanito proposed hwtools - scanport can recognize non-Pnp isa cards, but as with this stuff, can create a hang
http://damnsmalllinux.org/cgi-bin....l=lspnp

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kejava

Group: Members
Posts: 10
Joined: Dec. 2007

Posted: April 28 2008,16:10

Quote (reclusiarh @ Mar. 29 2008,10:46)

I've been able to make it work on DSL before by following the advice on the old forum. That was years ago and now I don't recall how I did it.

The card is pnp. I installed the new version of DSL. I remember that last time I had to install alsa and some other packages to make it work...

reclusiarh,

If the card you're talking about is an Aureal Vortex with a model name of AU8810, then it's not supported under OSS and you'll have to install ALSA to DSL. I'm basing this on OSS's hardware support site here. Go there and search for "vortex" so see.

If you're using the AU8820 or AU8830, you may be able to use the OSS module but I'm not sure what it's name would be. I just looked at the sound modules on my DSL install and compared them to what's on my Ubuntu install (ALSA). On Ubuntu they show up with predictable names: snd-au8810, snd-au8820, and snd-au8830. I don't see anything similar to that with DSL's OSS modules. That also makes me thing you need to go with ALSA.

You mentioned that this card is pnp. Just to clarify, that can go unsaid for devices that use the PCI bus

They built PnP into the PCI hardware spec. Where-as with ISA it was an after thought / hack. BTW, I could be wrong about most / all of this. I'm still learning the differences between OSS and ALSA module ... ISA pnp vs. ISA non-pnp. So double check my comments for yourself :;):

curaga

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Posted: April 28 2008,16:34

There's one more thing, kejava - the site you referenced is the current, great OSS 4.0, while the OSS in the linux kernel is the old, 3.0 or 2.0, so the OSS in DSL might not have Aureal support at all.

The story of the sound is very messy and involves many Bold and the beautiful-like turns

But in a nutshell OSS started as GPL, got adopted to the kernel as it surpassed the then current thingies, then 4Front decided to get paid for their audacious talent and got a deal with Sun that still lasts, and as the OSS had turned proprietary, the kernel folks did what X.org did - fork the last GPL sources.
The Linux OSS mostly got bugfixes, while The OSS kept developing. Having a non-current sound system with no new drivers made some people mad, and they wrote a new unique sound architecture, ALSA.
It gained popularity, it was in-kernel and in-development, and the kernel OSS got marked "deprecated", as it should have, and is nearly gone in 2.6.24.
4Front tech didn't like this boycott, and released OSS 4 as GPL, returning to their roots. It hasn't been accepted to the kernel, but many claim it is superior to ALSA, works on all unixes, and it gets new support faster than ALSA (look at Creative X-fi for example, it was a black sheep for a year, then OSS had support, ALSA did a month later)

Some history eh

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There's no such thing as life. Those mean little jocks invented it ;)
-
Windows is not a virus. A virus does something!

kejava

Group: Members
Posts: 10
Joined: Dec. 2007

Posted: April 28 2008,16:37

Quote (curaga @ April 28 2008,15:40)

Unfortunately being able to configure an ISA card from bios on a laptop tells nothing of it's plug-and-play abilities.

There are two main compiling extensions, gcc1-with-libs.unc and compile.uci, if you wish to compile the app yourself

edit: Juanito proposed hwtools - scanport can recognize non-Pnp isa cards, but as with this stuff, can create a hang
http://damnsmalllinux.org/cgi-bin....l=lspnp

thanks again curaga,

I'll look into those options. I did notice in the dmesg output that isapnp is built into the kernel. So it seems that if the ISA sound card is truly PnP, is should dump some useful info to /proc/bus/isapnp. I should also see some useful info in dmesg output if it detects the cards. Perhaps that's a good first step in determining if one's ISA card is PnP. What do you think?

After that, moving to the utilities you suggested for non-PnP ISA cards might be the next logical step. We have so many laptops ... I'm just trying to come up with a "safe" procedure. Another thing I've read is that sometimes you have to toggle the "PnP OS" option in BIOS to get the PnP devices scannable. Seems that some systems need it ON while others need it OFF to get PnP working.

Tricky stuff

18 replies since Mar. 06 2008,17:01

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