I am having trouble because the sound on my Dell Latitude CPi won't work. The problem seems to be that it doesn't appear in pnpdump. Would having it a full duplex or as half duplex in the bios matter? How can I get it to appear?

Well, to be honest, running pnpdump on my laptop (Dell Latitude D610) didn't produce anything about my sound card either (and it definitely works). Try running 'lspci' as root. If you don't see your sound card in that list, then there is definitely something wrong. If it appears in the list, then you are at least half-way there.

As for half vs. full-duplex, that is simply referring to whether the microphone can be recording at the same time as the sound card is playing. I don't think it would matter either way.

To get actual sound to come out of your sound card, you may have to build the ALSA packages specifically for your computer. I know that on my laptop, I uninstalled the ALSA packages that were installed by default in Slackware, downloaded the latest driver, util, and oss packages and build them myself. That was the only way I could consistently get sound every time I upgraded my kernel (or even in the first place).

Well, this is the result from lspci:
latitudinator:/home/arew264# lspci
0000:00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corp. 440BX/ZX/DX - 82443BX/ZX/DX Host bridge (AGP disabled) (rev 02)
0000:00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Neomagic Corporation NM2160 [MagicGraph 128XD]
0000:00:03.0 CardBus bridge: Texas Instruments PCI1131 (rev 01)
0000:00:03.1 CardBus bridge: Texas Instruments PCI1131 (rev 01)
0000:00:07.0 Bridge: Intel Corp. 82371AB/EB/MB PIIX4 ISA (rev 01)
0000:00:07.1 IDE interface: Intel Corp. 82371AB/EB/MB PIIX4 IDE (rev 01)
0000:00:07.2 USB Controller: Intel Corp. 82371AB/EB/MB PIIX4 USB (rev 01)
0000:00:07.3 Bridge: Intel Corp. 82371AB/EB/MB PIIX4 ACPI (rev 01)
0000:01:00.0 Ethernet controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL-8139/8139C/8139C+ (rev 10)


Unless I am missing something, it doesn't seem to be there. What do I have to do to get it listed? Should I try the old manual solution that didn't work very well in Damn Small Linux to see if the card is good? BTW, I am using Debian Sarge.

I found this link on http://www.linux-on-laptops.com ...

http://eulex.0nyx.com/cs4237b.html

Seems you have one of those very unfriendly pieces of hardware on your hands. At least the page in question also refers to making this card work under Debian.

Well, I installed 1 2.6 kernel and I can do setpnp in it (2.4 tells me that /prob/bus/pnp isnt there). Now ALSAconf won't detect the card (I think the modules aren't installed or something. Ugh. I can't get it to work in 2.4 either even after recompiling with every related pnp entry set to y. How do I get alsaconf to see the card in 2.6?

Well, I decided to take a different approach and use the card's sound blaster emulation mode. I did a 2.4 kernel recompile with oss and 100% sound blaster compatible set to y. It now boots and sees the sound card and allows me to play cds but XMMS won't play although it is set to OSS and gives no errors. I remember seeing an error message from the sound server once since I set it up but I hacen't gotten it again. Something about a value set to -1, the computer trying to get the value, asking for 16, and getting 8. I'll have to watch to see if it appears again. In the meantime, does anyone have any ideas about why this won't work?

Well, it appears as though the ALSA community fixed this problem because I upgraded to the current unstable version of alsa and alsaconf did the trick with no hacks or tweaks.