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[sindi keesan <keesan AT sdf.lonestar.org>]

I gave up a few months ago trying to get sound to work on a rather old 
Sb16 card with IRQ choices 10-14 and have set up a new computer with a 
newer card that the DOS diagnostics program identified as io 220, irq 5, 
dma 1.

I copied to /lib/modules/2.2.16/misc:

soundcore.o
soundlow.o
sound.o
v_midi.o
uart401.o
sb.o

I copied to the bl2 boot directory in DOS the bZimage from SW7.1 bare.i 
(718K), renamed it zimage-i, and made a booti.bat to point to that 
zimage-i instead of the BL2 zimage.  Booted with this kernel.

Did insmod of all the above.  I cannot omit v_midi or uart401 or sb won't 
work.  I tried trace_init=1 after insmod sound but got 'invalid 
parameter'.  Perhaps I typed it wrong.

Anyway, I could then do cat filename.wav > /dev/audio and I got a lot of 
noise about the same length as the wave file that sounded awful.

I found workbone.tgz, 10K, and installed it.  Typed workbone and it told 
me it could not find /dev/cdrom.  I read the man page and it explained to 
symlink my cdrom device in a way I did not understand so I made a guess:
cd /dev
ln -s /dev/hdc /dev/cdrom

I typed workbone again and it said there was nothing in the cdrom drive so 
I put in an audio disk, was told to turn on NumLock (man page also said to 
do this) and I got a template in the shape of the number pad with various 
icons that appeared to mean things like play, stop, pause, forward, 
backward.  I could stop, forward, etc. by pressing the pertinent key.  I 
could also exit by pressing INS and the music continued.  I could stop it 
by hitting the stop button on my drive.  

I could also start the music by hitting the play button, and go forward 
with that button (but not backwards).  Anyway, this proves that sound 
works, not that I really needed to play CDs on my computer.  I have not 
tested whether I can play them with just the play button and no sound 
modules/drivers.  Sometimes I need to have DOS software for SB16 installed 
before the play button will work, sometimes not - probably depends on the 
CD-ROM drive (or perhaps the card?).


Many thanks again to Ron for his clear instructions on how to use SB16 for 
sound.

I will hunt up a wav player (sox?) and midi player (timidity?) some day 
but what I am really after is realaudio and mplayer so I can listen to 
online radio.  A friend of ours announces (mostly just the non-commercial 
sponsors' announcements) at WEKU (E. Kentucky University) at the radio 
station and they play classical music most of the time.

I tried to install the large rp8*.bin file by typing rp8* and it 
complained about the screen.  I tried to switch from MDA to VGA screen and 
got four MDA terminals.  I rebooted with the VGA monitor turned on this 
time and could switch to VGA and loaded Xvesa and rxvt and typed rp8*
and it tried to install, gave me three pages of Warning:  
Translation_table syntaxerror:,  Unknown keysym name:  osfDown  and much 
more of the same, followed by a final 'Segmentation fault'.

I got segmentation faults before, but not all of this other stuff, when 
trying to install to a computer with hybrid glibc.  I got a few warnings 
when trying to install to a computer with pure glibc 2.2.6, and with X set 
up with only a few colors, but it did install.  I suspect Realaudio is not 
designed to work with Xvesa.  Any other ideas?  I might try installing to 
the computer that has both X and Xvesa, using Xvesa, to see if that works, 
in case I just need to add something there (as for rxvt, which works there 
with Xvesa but not on computers that have just Xvesa).

What does this keysym stuff mean?  It might give me a clue where the 
problem is. 

I wish a program for playing sounds were not so fussy about visual 
appearances. Has anyone managed to write a console version of Realaudio 
that works with links?  Or even mplayer?

I am starting to fear that I will have to install a more traditional X 
(SVGA server for Tseng or Trident, S3 for S3, Virge for Virge).  Problems 
with Xvesa-rxvt and user, problems with Realaudio, and the only two things 
I really wanted to do with X were xv/printing (needs to be user) and 
Realaudio (and mplayer - where would I find that in case it works with 
Xvesa?).

James, thanks for the idea of copying e2fsck to DOS BL2 partition.

















keesan AT sdf.lonestar.org
SDF Public Access UNIX System - http://sdf.lonestar.org