A Linux Question...

[chazdraves]

Glad to see I'm not simply losing my mind...

The other problem with Ubuntu would seem to be that they decided against having a modules.conf... instead modules.conf is made from about 5 other files... From the reading I've done it would appear you can add your code to any one of them and it should work out when you "update modules", but that doesn't seem to be entirely the case...

I found the file that seemed to be dealing with sound hardware and I added in the code that NewBlackDak provided, but it seems to no avail...

When I try (from the GUI) to run Volume monitor it tells me it could not reach the sound daemon and to run "esd" at the terminal - which, of course, does nothing for me... If I go under my multimedia configuration and "Test" the sound I get "Could not initiate test pipe" no matter if I select OSS, ESD, or ALSA for sound...

I'll check out that link you sent as soon as I get a couple free minutes, but it's off to work for now. Thanks so much for helping me out here... I sense we're not near done yet, but at least we've made some progress.

Best Wishes,
- Chaz

 

[drag]

The other problem with Ubuntu would seem to be that they decided against having a modules.conf... instead modules.conf is made from about 5 other files... From the reading I've done it would appear you can add your code to any one of them and it should work out when you "update modules", but that doesn't seem to be entirely the case...

That's a normal debian-ism.

That way when you upgrade packages they have their own individual module file they monkey with and leave the rest of the files alone. The contents of everything in the /etc/modutils.d/ directory gets added to your modules.conf file.

When upgrading and changing packages that have to do with modules it's difficult to do inline text editing on a file that is shared with other packages. It's much easier to add a directory then run a cron (timed) script that builds the finished config file from easier-to-manage smaller individual files.

So you'd want to stick the contents of the file he showed you into something like:
/etc/modutils.d/alsa-custom

It can be named anything. There maybe a alsa config already in there.

Then run
update-modules
to build the /etc/modules.conf file.

I don't know if that's what your doing exactly.. you stated update modules, which is two words, the actual command is hyphinated.

Then there may be a /etc/modules
Just modules, no extra .conf or anything like that.

In that is were you stick modules that you want to automaticly load at boot up time that are outside the normal hardware detection and configuration boot-time scripts.

You just want to add the line:
snd-cs4236

to /etc/modules. Then reboot.

When your finished rebooting you can know for certain that your sound card works by running
alsamixer

If you don't want to reboot you can simply go:
modprobe snd-cs4236

from the command line.

Alsamixer custom tool designed to work with alsa drivers specificly. When run from root it's the definitave test to weither your alsa modules are able to get at least limited functionality or not.

Other mixers are more generic and may give misleading results.

If it doesn't work it may be the incorrect module (there is snd-cs4232 or something that is similar), or you told it the wrong memory address or irq number. Since it's ISA (supposadly) it needs to be told the resources instead of like more modern pci which gets configured automaticly.

Note that all of this is very specific to Debian. Ubuntu is based on Debian, but shown by the lack of alsaconf, it's not exactly the same.


After all that, and alsamixer works, then you'll probably have to monkey around with dmix to setup software mixing to get multiple sound input working. Due to the limited nature of your card (and most other laptop sound cards) it can take extra work to get it working all correctly.

Yes, I know this is a pain in the @ss.

 

[Infohawk]

Originally posted by: Nothinman

My friend, this is Linux. Very little is easy to the inexperienced. Very little.

Right, because ISA cards just magically work with no problems what so ever in Windows...

chazdraves, out of curiosity, was it hard to get your sound card working in windows?