Hey all,

I've looked around Google and the Search on LQ quite extensively and wasn't able to find a solution to this problem, so I thought I'd post about it. My sound card is an ISA Cirrus Logic Crystal 4237B on a Dell Inspiron 3200 laptop running Debian Sarge (minimal, upgraded). I'm sure the hardware works as it has before, and I believe that I'm just two minutes short of getting it working, but I'm just not sure where to go from here.

lsmod shows that the cs4236 module is installed, but it also shows that the cs4231 module is installed too ... perhaps they're conflicting somehow? I've never heard of conflicts happening in linux though ... Also, the alsa ultilities and drivers are installed. I'm not too sure what else to mention, so let me know if you need to know anything (I'd be more than grateful to support you)!

Try to remove the other driver (rmmod), if possible, to see if that helps (and vice versa after that, if it won't). Then open up a mixer (I suggest trying aumix) and check out your volumes aren't 0 - some distributions/installs seem to do some magic and set them down so you won't hear anything. Also, if you open up some music player, will it start playing (with no sound) or stop and give error or simply not start? If it starts, the problem is with the sound coming out. If it won't even start playing, then the problem could be with the device file/permissions..

rmmod says that snd_cs4231 does not exist in /proc/modules :P

I did a little more investigating and found "/etc/hotplug/isapnp.rc" I executed the script via "./isapnp.rc retsart" and it verbosed that cs4236 is blacklisted. That's ok because I actually want to load snd-cs4236 (for ALSA, cs4236 w/o the snd- prefix is for OSS). But that makes me think a little more ... I am going to make a wild stab and say that I think, somewhere in a script/config file/whatever somewhere, cs4236 is trying to load (but fails as it is only permitting snd-cs4236 for ALSA support). But that's just my best guess!

"modprobe snd-cs4236" verboses "No such device" too

There might also be a chance that this ISA card is not PnP, so extra options might be required by the module before the card will function. Perhaps that is why modprobe is verbosing that the device doesn't exist?

I'm still not sure where the problem is, but I thought sharing some results from internet resources might help a bit

bump

10 char limit

Any ideas?

Anyone? I really miss using sound on this laptop

When I used Debian, some years back, I also had an ISA soundcard.

The command pnpdump is the key.

Run this command and pipe its output a file. Edit this file and see what you need.
Copy the file to, e.g. /etc/isasound.conf

Make a start script containing some insmod/modprobe commands, and the command:
isapnp /etc/isasound.conf

But, try running these commands in a shell first, to get everything to work.

I'll see if I find my old config file somewhere.