Baslinux mailing list

["David Moberg" <davidjmoberg AT lycos.com>]

----- Original Message -----
From: "sindi keesan" <keesan AT sdf.lonestar.org>
 
> On Sun, 29 May 2005, David Moberg wrote:
> 
> > ----- Original Message -----
> > From: "sindi keesan" <keesan AT sdf.lonestar.org>
> >
> >> What does initialization do?
> >
> > It tells the PnP card what IO address and IRQ to live at. It's
> > like setting the jumpers on a non-PnP card.
> 
> With the sb I specify the address and IRQ with insmod - is this 
> instead of initialization?

It is a (very crude) form of "initialization" which is built into
sb.o.

> Two SB clones also work in linux and the DOS initialization program 
> did not recognize them.  If I were to run isapnp maybe the settings 
> would not be required after insmod?

They are still required.

> As long as I get any amount of sound out at all I can change the 
> volume with the volume knob on the radio or on my older CT cards 
> (or the Sound Galaxy if I get that going with s_galaxy.o).  aumix 
> controls the mixer, which specifies how loud to make each source?  
> (FM synthesis, input from CD, wav player, etc.)

That is correct.

> Should I set BIOS to permanently assign DMA and IRQ to the sound card?

Can you? I would only do that if it kept everything (video card, etc.)
happy.

.....

[Creative Live!]

> The person with problems posted something that might be dmesg, and it 
> could not find sound-slot-1 and sound-service-0-6, which I hope are 
> not required modules for this card.

sound-slot-1 is what you put in modules.conf if you're using an automated
module insertion system like kmod. sound-slot-1 is equivalent to /dev/dsp.
If you're using kmod, when you try to write to /dev/dsp then kmod will
instantly insert the sound modules listed in modules.conf after sound-slot-1.
sound-service-0-6 is similar (midi?).

> hwinfo reveals that ALL my IRQs are taken, and if I free one up by 
> disabling USB onboard, the video card grabs it.  Does the video card 
> work better with an IRQ?  If so, I will leave USB disabled unless 
> this PCI sound card also frees up an IRQ for video.  The scsi card 
> grabbed an IRQ.

I don't think the video card needs an IRQ. hwinfo might not be telling
you the whole story. /proc/interrupts shows all of the ones used by
hardware in Linux.

> We were also given three more AGP video cards with big heat sinks 
> and/or fans and up to 128MB RAM.  Would they be better than the 64MB 
> heat-sink-less Nvidia for DVDs?

About the best you can do is a card with motion compensation. Almost
every card with more than 16MB has hardware mo-comp. Something with
VIDIX drivers is easiest to get working in MPlayer. Here's a list
of the VIDIX drivers (from MPlayer documentation):

ATI
later Mach64s
Rage128
Radeon

Matrox G200, G400, G450 and G550

Trident Cyberblade/i1 chipset, which can be found on VIA Epia motherboards. 

Although there is a driver for the 3DLabs GLINT R3 and Permedia3 chips, no 
one has tested it, so reports are welcome. 

There's a relatively new nVidia driver out there, it's known to work on Riva 
128, TNT and GeForce2 chipsets, also others have been reported working. 

    *

      It's recommended to use the binary nVidia drivers for X before using 
this VIDIX driver, because some of the registers which need to be initialized 
haven't been discovered yet, so it will probably fail with the Open Source 
XFree86 nv.o driver.
    *

This is very experimental code, just like nvidia_vid.

It's been tested on SiS 650/651/740 (the most common chipsets used in the SiS 
versions of the "Shuttle XPC" barebones boxes out there)

Reports awaited! 

> Vibra16 was supposed to be lacking something.  Maybe you can't record with 
> it?

You can definitely record with it. It is likely the higher sample rate (which 
is
only available with newer drivers) and the awe32 midi support.

> I think I am probably having IRQ or DMA conflicts.  Disabling USB did 
> not help.  All IRQs are taken.  I disabled the second parport on the 
> MGA card so sound could have IRQ5.  The PCI video card grabbed an 
> IRQ.    Should I be doing something in BIOS to assign IRQs and DMAs 
> to the ISA sound card?
> Maybe AWE64 uses more DMAs than AWE32?  I have a DOS text on awe from 
> CT and discovered SOUND and AWE HOWTO's on the 7.1 installation CD.

I have no idea as to what is going on here with Win98FE.

> The DVD-ROM in there disables DMA access the first time I try to read 
> a CD with it, and also IRQ times out every time after that- should I 
> be running hdparm to permanently disable DMA access like you said you 
> did?

Probably.

> Or would it slow down the playing of DVD movies, which is all I 
> need the drive for?

Can you play DVDs with DMA enabled? Otherwise, there is no point
to enable it. You will need to use vesa, lots of frame dropping
without DMA unless you have a fast CPU.

> The busybox hdparm did not give me anything about 
> DMAs as an option.

It is optional to include dma support in busybox hdparm. The
-d option may work even if it's not listed in the (very terse)
busybox hdparm --help.

> I put in a SCSI CD-ROM drive instead, which works 
> faster.  Does SCSI use IRQs and DMAs?

That depends on the SCSI card.

David

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