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

I have a DVD-ROM drive as /dev/hdc, in a computer with scsi and ethernet 
pci cards and all the IRQs taken (even if I disabled onboard USB).  I was
until now not able to use my ISA/pnp CT AWE32 without causing an IRQ and 
DMA conflict, timeout and disable when I tried to mount a CD.  This 
wasted about 10 seconds each time.

So I was using a pci sound card without AWE support and thinking about 
whether to learn ALSA sound so as to use a pci SB Live! card instead 
(because the AWE feature of it is not supported by OSS, or even DOS).

David Moberg suggested adding to the loadlin line bios=nopci so that linux 
would ignore however BIOS was setting things up to conflict.  But first I 
decided to edit the BIOS setting and I set IRQ5 to ISA/EISA instead of 
PCI/PNP.  I left DMA's on auto.  I could have set DMA1 to ISA/EISA too.

In order to make AWE work in DOS (and then in linux - DOS presets things 
properly on the pnp card) I run ctcm, and set IRQ to 5 that way.  First I 
had to run ctcu (or edit a .cfg file manually) to choose the desired IRQ, 
address, and dmas, and I also disabled the IDE controller on the card and 
the gameport.

The dvd-rom drive accesses a Win95 CD in DOS after about 10 seconds.  (I 
did not time it before changing BIOS).  In linux it is now instant!

I am posting this for other users of obsolete ISA sound cards in 
overcrowded computers.  I also have ISA modem (pnp) for which I have not 
set the IRQ in BIOS, but might try that too to see if dialing speeds up.

Now that I have the sound card working with AWE, I tried loading a 3.5MB 
.sf2 sound bank instead of the 35K default synthgm.sbk, but all the wind 
instruments STILL sound like piano or harpsichord or organ.  At least the 
piano midis sound better than with FM synthesis.  Time to do more reading 
about linux and AWE.  Keyboard pieces sound pretty good.

David pointed out that the BL kernels were set to recognize BIOS settings 
- why?  This may be what caused the problem.  They were configured to ANY.

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