Andy Chase

Well, it nearly killed me, but I got my sound chip working on my Linuxfromscratch system using the ALSA 0.5 driver, and installed a pretty good audio player that will play stuff from my IceCast server on the other box. I haven't gotten around to trying an audio CD yet... having sound at all is enough of a novelty right now.



I think I still have some startup script finagling to do if I want to get the sound driver to load automagically, but again, having the sound working at all is such a pleasure right now that I'm not going to worry about it.



My "Etower 566 i2" handles sound on the motherboard, thanks to the Intel 810 chipset and an AC97 controller. It's never sounded that great in Windows; turn the master volume up much past 33% and it distorts horribly.



I expected about the same level of performance under Linux, but to my pleasant surprise the 810 chip sounds great with Freeamp... cleaner and fuller than anything in Windows ever has.



Which is rewarding, because I was up until about 1:30 this morning trying to get the ALSA drivers working... I initially installed the 0.5 drivers, since the 0.9 package is still marked Beta. The problem was that I had installed XMMS as my audio player, and I needed to compile the ALSA output plugin, which demanded the 0.9 drivers and header files. To make matters worse, I had initially compiled the drivers without specifying a specific sound card, so it built all of the drivers, not just the ones specific to my machine. I finally gave up on XMMS and gave Alsaplayer a try - and it worked! I like the reverse-play and speed control options in Alsaplayer, but otherwise it's a fairly minimal app with an unfriendly interface.



Where I really got into trouble was when I went to remove those unneeded modules by hand.



To make an already long story shorter, today I finally got everything working after completely wiping my /lib/modules/2.4.16 directory, rebuilding the kernel (taking the opportunity to add the input core and Wacom tablet modules while I was at it), rebuilding the ALSA 0.5 drivers and libraries, and making sure to update my /etc/modules.conf file.



If anyone else out there is pulling their hair out trying to get the snd-card-intel8x0 driver compiled on their E-machines 566 i2, make sure you also add the via686a driver to your configure line, I.E.:

../configure --prefix=/usr --enable-shared --with-cards=intel8x0,via686a.

Otherwise you're going to wind up with a bunch of infuriating 'unresolved symbol' errors - and searching Google won't do you much good.



Anyway, I'm pretty psyched - my Linux desktop is shaping up to be nice and slick, and very usable. I still need to get the hang of ROX-Filer, but I already love its MIME and icon handling. I got GIMP installed yesterday, and my next adventure in Linux configuration will probably be trying to get my Wacom tablet working with GIMP.



Other than that, I need to get a good CVS GUI client so I can get back to working on the site.