biglig2's Journal: Back on the StinkPad

Aww, I like my Thinkpad really. OK, another go. Mandrake 8.1 fixes the kernel problem (8.0 on a thinkpad, the trackpoint doesn't work) so lets try that. Surely a shiny modern distro can get the sound working? Alan Cox has a 600E for flips sake!

Soo...Chug chug, on goes the Mandrake. Putting Gnme and KDE on. Worth a try, and with the funky gdm (kdm? xdm? ) it's easy to swap between the two.

I put Mandrake on a desktop first to look at it and their rpmdrake package for installing stuff seems neat. For the Stinkpad something that comes on 3 CDs beats Debian since I haven't a fast net access at home, so being able to install stuff from CD will help, hopefully.

It's churning, still churning, at the "l"s now, which is not so bad since G and K are before that in the alphabet ;-)

Some notes on mandrake sound, both +ve and -ve, from mandrakes forums:

Q:I have an IBM Thinkpad 600e with a Crystal sound card that does not want to work. lspnp -v is as follows:
0e CSC0100 multimedia controller: audio
io 0x0530-0x0537
io 0x0388-0x038b
io 0x0220-0x0233
irq 5
dma 1
dma 0
I have tried loading both the alsa and kernel modules and the sound worked under Debian kernel 2.2.18. Any suggestions?
A:My successes have only been with 2.2 kernels.
Vendor: Cirrus Logic / Crystal Semiconductor
Device Name: Crystal Semiconductor CS4239 / ISA and Crystal Semiconductor CS4610 / PCI
CS4239: ISA/ SRS 3D audio /FM synthesis / 16-bit playback and record
CS4610: PCI / decodes AC3 into stereo / MPEG-2 audio decoding

OSS light configuration for CS4239
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Put the following lines into /etc/modules.conf (or conf.modules for some older distributions).

alias sound-slot-0 cs4232
options cs4232 io=0x530 irq=5 dma=1 dma2=0 mpuio=0x330 mpuirq=5
options opl3 io=0x388

Now as root, first run depmod followed by modprobe sound-slot-0.

The sound modules should now be loaded (you can check with lsmod)

If you are going to compile your own kernel, make sure you select the following options for OSS Light Sound support (note that the following can vary a bit depending on the kernel version):
Sound
Sound card support = M
OSS sound modules = M
Support for Crystal CS4232 based (PnP) cards = M

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ALSA 0.59x configuration for CS4239
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ALSA (Advanced Linux Sound Architecture) is meant to replace OSS as the soundsystem for Linux.
At the moment it is not included with any standard kernels yet, although some Linux distributions are including it already (e.g. SuSE).

In most cases however, ALSA will have to be downloaded and installed by the user itself. ALSA can be found at http://www.alsa-project.org/

The following entries in /etc/modules.conf (or conf.modules for some older distributions) should do the trick in getting ALSA running on the ThinkPad 770X and 770Z with the CS4239 soundchip, and also provide OSS emulation so existing applications will still work. At the time of writing (9-Jan-2001) the latest version of ALSA (0.5.10a) still does not work with the PCI CS4610 chip in the ThinkPad 770X and 770Z models, and so the ISA CS4239 soundchip is the only possibility to get sound.

# ALSA native device support
alias char-major-116 snd
options snd snd_major=116 snd_cards_limit=1
alias snd-card-0 snd-card-cs4236
options snd-card-cs4236 snd_index=0 snd_id=cs4239 snd_isapnp=0 snd_port=0x530 snd_cport=0x538 snd_mpu_port=1 snd_fm_port=0x388 snd_dma1=1 snd_dma1_size=64 snd_dma2=0 snd_dma2_size=64 snd_irq=5
# OSS/Free emulation
alias char-major-14 soundcore
alias sound-slot-0 snd-card-0
alias sound-service-0-0 snd-mixer-oss
alias sound-service-0-1 snd-seq-oss
alias sound-service-0-3 snd-pcm-oss
alias sound-service-0-12 snd-pcm-oss

After adding these entries, run as root first depmod followed by modprobe snd. This should cause the modules to get loaded (you can check with lsmod).

Note:
The software volumes in ALSA upon initialization are turned down (and muted) all the way, so you will have to use a mixer control utility to turn them up before sound can be heard.

If you are going to compile your own kernel, then just make sure that base sound support is compiled. No OSS modules need to be compiled (but can be, just make sure they don't get loaded).

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My success has been with OSS
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