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  • From: sindi keesan <keesan AT sdf.lonestar.org>
  • To: baslinux AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [BL] another BL kernel with more sound support
  • Date: Wed, 25 May 2005 14:10:09 +0000 (UTC)

On Tue, 24 May 2005, Mr Christopher Rose wrote:

Will it work on my 100MHz laptop which is currently
running BL3? Just curious.

Since BL2 and Bl3 both use 2.2.16 kernel, it should work (and if your sound chip is one of the ones I compiled for you may also get sound) if you have:

a) a pentium (not 386 or 486)
b) you are booting from ext2 partition - I compiled loop as module not part of the kernel, and it is needed to boot from fs.img on a DOS partition (the 20MB version of BL3)

I just noticed that the .sb kernel (which has two ethernet cards as modules which are not in BL kernels) and the .snd kernel (minus those two ethernet cards but plus several sound modules) are both 48066 bytes. They both include support for aic7xxx scsi card. I don't think the regular BL kernels support scsi cards, just scsi-emulation (which explains why sd and sg devices were included- sda4 is parport zip drive, and I think sg0 is CD burner - but not sr devices, which are actual scsi CD-ROM drives).

You will also need to make any sound devices used by your sound program. Christof included them in his BL2 and BL3 sound packages, along with sb-related modules and programs used to play sound. I also posted a mksdndev script that makes /dev/dsp and /dev/audio and /dev/sndstat, needed to use sox, mpg123 and mplayer, that should also work for non-sb sound cards (sb - soundblaster 16), but you will need to figure out which modules to use on your own.

For playing midis you may need other devices, not sure yet which ones (/dev/midi /dev/sequencer?) and perhaps also another module or two not in his package.

config.snd lists what is in the kernel, if you can understand it.

The linux SOUND howto lists sound chips supported by OSS sound system in linux, but it is not complete. I managed to get my Opti 931 card to play sound (it is not on the list) by doing a search on Opti and linux and insmod, and a Bulgarian forum listed all the modules needed for the Opti 930, which worked for the 931 (and appeared to work for 929A but I got an error message when I tried to play sound about not finding the device).
Is there a quicker/easier way to determine which modules a card needs?

Someone with Redhat (possibly a later kernel) got this information at boot time - required modules and I think also the settings needed for them (but could not understand it). Is this ALSA? Do you need PCI cards to get the info? James says isapnptools can sometimes help to figure out the settings, or you can experiment a lot (but the opti cards turned out to use io=0x530 and I had given up after going from 00 to 360 by 10s).

Different cards need different settings - the PCI cards (and your laptop probably has a PCI chip) don't need them at all, SB needs io irq and dma (and in my newer computers also high dma, or dma16, to avoid dma conflicts). Opti needed also two settings for mpu_io and mpu_irq.

Does dmesg report which sound chip is in a laptop computer? There is nothing about my ISA sound card in there. People were recommending various diagnostic programs for DOS and linux - which ones report the sound chip? (My DOS program syschk does, but often gets it wrong. SB16 is sometimes reported as SB Pro). I look on the card for the largest chip.

In the case of Crystal/opti cards both chips needed driver modules (ad1848 for Adlib, and mad16 for the opti). I was able to get useful info by searching on both chips at once. Another Crystal ISA card with one chip appears to also need two drivers, and Crystal cards need uart401 too. Plus you need to start with soundcore soundlow sound. And add yet another module for midi sound.

The newer PCI chips seem to work with just soundcore and the card-specific driver (esssolo1 for ES1868, es1371for Ensonic audioPCI and trident for Trident - but the latter two may also need a volume control program, as may one of the Crystal cards).

I have a Yamaha XG PCI card that is said to work in ALSA but to have no OSS drivers.

I hope that newer kernels, newer hardware, and ALSA, have automated this process. It has taken me two years to get one of four opti cards to work. It helps if you can test them in DOS or Windows first, in case they are dead (several of mine were).

It is becoming increasingly clear to me why Steven did not include sound support in 'basic' linux. It is fun but exasperating. Even scsi is more predictable (if you get a PCI card, anyway).

Got to go test the other scsi external CD-ROM drive, mplayer with xvidix and some other experiments. How do other people get sound to work?

Pax,
Christopher


--- sindi keesan <keesan AT sdf.lonestar.org> wrote:
keesan.freeshell.org/bl/zimage.snd
Similar to zimage.sb but with support for more sound
cards, not just sb16
(sb.o) but also es1370 es1371 cs4232 mad16 uart401
trident mss s_galaxy
ym3812 and opl-something-or-other. Please let me
know if I missed
anything that you want. see also config.snd and
config.sb.


Also has scsi support for aic7xxx (a common card).
Otherwise mostly
similar to BL2 kernel but no firewall support.
ppp/slhc is built-in.

465K, half the size of bare.i kernel. Pentium.

blfiles.htm
lists all my postings, including ghoscript 8.50 and
lynx 2.8.5.

The problem I was having dialing with this kernel
was related to my
changing modems. USR needs AT&F1.

To compare files in bash cmp file1 file2 will list
the first line and
character where they differ. comm lists both files
somehow.

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