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
Show replies by date
This won't be much help I'm afraid but I can say that I sympathise. I
have an old ISA Creative Soundblaster. It is supposedly supported....
yeah right. The only distro that it does actually work on is SuSE. I
have never been able to get this particular old lady to run on any
Debian based system with one exception. So, it could actually be
something to do with the kernel modules that are loaded in Debian. I
do have some documentation somewhere that I was sent which did enable
the card for a short period of time for me on the pre release Xandros
distro. This was pre to Xandros 1 but it was/is Deb based. I'll see
if I can find it out.. watch this space...
--
==============================================
Kevan Farmer
Linux user #373362
Staffordshire
Just an update, i've managed to get my ISA soundcard working. I forgot
to run alsaconf when I installed ALSA, it detected my card and its
playing music now.... it could now end up being used as a music
server.
On 02/11/2007, Kevanf1 <kevanf1(a)gmail.com> wrote:
This won't be much help I'm afraid but I can say that I
sympathise. I
have an old ISA Creative Soundblaster. It is supposedly supported....
yeah right. The only distro that it does actually work on is SuSE. I
have never been able to get this particular old lady to run on any
Debian based system with one exception. So, it could actually be
something to do with the kernel modules that are loaded in Debian. I
do have some documentation somewhere that I was sent which did enable
the card for a short period of time for me on the pre release Xandros
distro. This was pre to Xandros 1 but it was/is Deb based. I'll see
if I can find it out.. watch this space...
--
==============================================
Kevan Farmer
Linux user #373362
Staffordshire
--
Adam Nicholls
On 05/11/2007, adam nicholls <inkysplat(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Just an update, i've managed to get my ISA soundcard working. I
forgot
to run alsaconf when I installed ALSA, it detected my card and its
playing music now.... it could now end up being used as a music
server.
Good man :-) well done. It's a damn good feeling getting something
like that sorted. Just out of curiosity, what soundcard is it?
--
==============================================
Kevan Farmer
Linux user #373362
Staffordshire