Installing ISA soundblaster ESS ES1868 on Ubuntu 12.04
 

Dear Folks.

After the support for XP stopped I ran the Win 7 advisor.
It seems that I have not enough RAM my HDD's are too small.
My processors are too slow as well.
All my software is outdated and I have to buy new versions
of Office etc.

As all my PC's run fine on XP I decided to change to Linux.

I started with the oldest one first but I have an ESS ES 1868
that I can't configure. This is an ISA card.

I am running Ubuntu 12.04 which is fully updated.
I hope somebody can point me in the right direction as I am
brandnew to Linux

Manpage

http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/....4freebsd.html


You can try typing in

in a terminal
F6 to select sound card
F5 to see all sound controls.

m key to mute and unmute
up and down arrow keys to turn up or turn down volume
left and right keys to scroll through control settings
MM in alsamixer=mute

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/So...otingProcedure

Hi:

Welcome to LQ!

Is the soundblaster card you have anything like this one in this picture?
http://www.kids-online.net/learn/cli...s/expslot.html

I thought I posted an answer before but to re-iterate : my card is a single ISA card ESS ES1868.
Alsamixer reports there is no hardware to configure and I tried to run "Ubuntu-bug audio"
which does not run either. It tells me there is no sound package.

I can see the card in "Dmesg" as 0.627798 01:01:card'ESS ES1869 Plug and Play AudioDrive'
0.627806 isapnp: 1 Plug & Play card detected total.

XP has no problem with the card which proves it is not a hardware or volume or speaker problem.

Cheers

Theo

That hardware is supported according to http://www.linux.com/learn/docs/ldp/...re-HOWTO#SOUND.

What do you get with:
aplay --list-devices

Regards,
Stefan

Hi Stefan,

Yes I know it is supported and I can see it in 'dmesg' but the terminal reports

theob@theob-desktop2:~$ sudo aplay --list-devices
[sudo] password for theob:
aplay: device_list:252: no soundcards found...
theob@theob-desktop2:~$ aplay --list-devices

Cheers

Theo

For the ESS ES 1868 you need the snd-es18xx kernel module. This looks like a good howto http://www.pc-freak.net/blog/configu...xubuntu-linux/

Hi Allend,

Thank you for the link but I can't use those commands, they don't work on Ubuntu 12.04.
They don't mention where to get the proper Xubuntu kernel either.

Thank you for your response.
Best regards
Theo

Have you tried 'sudo modprobe snd-es18xx' as the command to test whether your card is then recognised in alsamixer?

If the above works, you can do 'gksudo gedit /etc/modules' to add a line with "snd-es18xx" (without the quotes) to make the change permanent.

Hi Allend,

Yes I have tried that but nothing happens although terminal does not complain about the command.
It will also take 'sudo modprobe snd-sb16' but anything else it will not find. I have tried with
Alsamixer as well as Pulse Audio but no results.

Best regards
Theo

It may be that you need to supply parameters to the snd-es18xx kernel module when it is loaded. For examples of usage see here. http://alsa.opensrc.org/Es18xx

Hi Allend,

I had a look at the Alsa website and tried some of the commands that agree with my Bios settings.
The Bios settings must be right because XP has no problem.

To cut a long story short I still have no sound. I read an article on http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/....4freebsd.html that seems to apply. But it is a bit over my head, I am
not that clever yet. I tried to put those parameters in the start-up files but it didn't work.
It is possible that I did it wrong.

Best regards
Theo

That article is for FreeBSD, which is not Linux.

Windows is an excellent troubleshooting tool for Linux. If the card is working in XP, then you can check the ports, IRQ and DMA channel settings that you need to set in Linux.

Hi Allend,

That's exactly what I have done : I/O base 220, IRQ 5, DMA 1, MPU401 enabled I/O 330 - 333, Game port
enabled 200 - 207

But no luck.

Best regards
Theo

Hi again Allend,

I found this with Dmesg.

[ 48.176047] eth0: no IPv6 routers present
[ 205.866692] es18xx-pnpbios 01:01.01: [dma 1]
[ 205.866706] es18xx-pnpbios 01:01.01: [dma 3]
[ 205.866778] es18xx-pnpbios 01:01.01: [irq 5]
[ 205.866798] es18xx-pnpbios 01:01.01: [io 0x0220-0x022f]
[ 205.866813] es18xx-pnpbios 01:01.01: [io 0x0388-0x038b]
[ 205.866827] es18xx-pnpbios 01:01.01: [io 0x0330-0x0331]
[ 205.869223] es18xx-pnpbios 01:01.01: activated
[ 205.890210] es18xx-pnpbios 01:01.01: disabled
[ 205.890241] es18xx-pnpbios: probe of 01:01.01 failed with error -2
[ 205.890424] es18xx 01:01.00: [io 0x0800-0x0807]
[ 205.892637] es18xx 01:01.00: activated
[ 205.904779] es18xx 01:01.01: [dma 1]
[ 205.904793] es18xx 01:01.01: [dma 3]
[ 205.904875] es18xx 01:01.01: [irq 5]
[ 205.904895] es18xx 01:01.01: [io 0x0220-0x022f]
[ 205.904910] es18xx 01:01.01: [io 0x0388-0x038b]
[ 205.904923] es18xx 01:01.01: [io 0x0330-0x0331]
[ 205.907264] es18xx 01:01.01: activated
[ 205.921104] dsp_get_byte failed: 0x22a = 0xaa!!!
[ 205.921117] es18xx: [0x220] ESS chip not found
[ 205.923533] es18xx 01:01.00: disabled
[ 205.925916] es18xx 01:01.01: disabled

Hope this will help

Best regards
Theo