[Staffslug] Ancient Hardware and Soundcard Hell

Hey guys, I've bought a ancient computer to mess about on and maybe write some low-level C programs (as part of my degree/course). Its specs are Pentium 2 266MHz 128MB SDRAM PC100 ATI Rage 3D AGP x2 its a quality computer :P and great fun to poke about on. Shes got Debian Unstable (sid?) on her atm from a Minimal Netinstall, and have got XFCE on it. To the Point: I can't get any sound of the bloody thing. I apt'd alsa-base and alsa-utils, this only gives /etc/init.d/alsa-utils when I start it I get the usual error of no volume to store, and then tells me no sound card found. Being an older machine I thought the driver might be covered in the old OSS system, so I installed alsa-oss but it didn't make any difference. So giving up on ALSA, I went looking at the hardware. I ran lspci and from what I can see theres no mention of any "Multimedia" or "Audio" labeled devices. Though someone on here might know different? (I don't know my vintage soundcards) adam@debian:/etc/init.d$ lspci 00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation 440BX/ZX/DX - 82443BX/ZX/DX Host bridge (rev 02) 00:01.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 440BX/ZX/DX - 82443BX/ZX/DX AGP bridge (rev 02) 00:07.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation 82371AB/EB/MB PIIX4 ISA (rev 02) 00:07.1 IDE interface: Intel Corporation 82371AB/EB/MB PIIX4 IDE (rev 01) 00:07.2 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82371AB/EB/MB PIIX4 USB (rev 01) 00:07.3 Bridge: Intel Corporation 82371AB/EB/MB PIIX4 ACPI (rev 02) 00:10.0 Ethernet controller: Intel Corporation 82557/8/9 [Ethernet Pro 100] (rev 05) 01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc 3D Rage Pro AGP 1X/2X (rev 5c So I decided to take a look at dmesg see if anything was mentioned at boot up, theres this interesting section: isapnp: Scanning for PnP cards... isapnp: Card 'Onboard PnP Audio' isapnp: 1 Plug & Play card detected total pnp: Device 01:01.00 disabled. So I'm assuming I have an ISA Plug-n-Pray Soundcard. Upon googling for ISA and Linux stuff, the only thing I could find was to install isapnptools, which is a very old Debian package which isn't recommended as most ISA stuff can be handled by the kernel now-a-days. I thought prehaps the soundcard was disabled in the BIOS and double checked and its enabled. I'm sorry to say I'm not very good with my old-skool hardware, and didn't pay much attention on my degree when we were being taught about configuring IRQs so I'm not sure if this is IRQ releated problem? I though I'd check to see if there is any ISA loaded modules and found a whole heap of sound modules loaded... are any of these conflicting with my soundcard or messing up ALSA? adam@debian:~$ lsmod|grep snd snd_cs4232 15060 0 snd_opl3_lib 9824 1 snd_cs4232 snd_hwdep 8772 1 snd_opl3_lib snd_cs4231_lib 23296 1 snd_cs4232 snd_pcm_oss 39200 0 snd_mixer_oss 15424 1 snd_pcm_oss snd_pcm 72324 2 snd_cs4231_lib,snd_pcm_oss snd_page_alloc 9512 2 snd_cs4231_lib,snd_pcm snd_mpu401_uart 8096 1 snd_cs4232 snd_seq_dummy 3748 0 snd_seq_oss 29408 0 snd_seq_midi 8160 0 snd_seq_midi_event 6880 2 snd_seq_oss,snd_seq_midi snd_seq 46320 6 snd_seq_dummy,snd_seq_oss,snd_seq_midi,snd_seq_m idi_event snd_timer 21028 4 snd_opl3_lib,snd_cs4231_lib,snd_pcm,snd_seq snd_rawmidi 22624 2 snd_mpu401_uart,snd_seq_midi snd_seq_device 7692 6 snd_opl3_lib,snd_seq_dummy,snd_seq_oss,snd_seq_m idi,snd_seq,snd_rawmidi snd 48324 13 snd_cs4232,snd_opl3_lib,snd_hwdep,snd_cs4231_li b,snd_pcm_oss,snd_mixer_oss,snd_pcm,snd_mpu401_uart,snd_seq_oss,snd_seq,snd_time r,snd_rawmidi,snd_seq_device soundcore 7520 1 snd Anyways, any help is appreciated. It'd be nice to have sound though its not essiential... never know it might make a nice project for me to write my first device driver. -- Adam Nicholls