Sound problem with Debian Sarge on old Pentium II laptop
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Sound problem with Debian Sarge on old Pentium II laptop
I'm running an old version of Sarge (testing) on a Gateway Pentium II 366 MHz Laptop (with no network card; I can only install from CD's). I'm using kernel 2.4.27, and running icewm.
After quite a bit of reading and experimentation, I was able to play audio CD's using various CD player programs (Gnome CD player, cccd, XfreeCD, etc....), but when I play .mp3, .wav, .aiff, .ogg etc files on a program like XMMS, I get "skips" in the sound, like an old, scratched vinyl LP.
Audacity gives this message when I try to play a file:
Error while opening sound device. Please check the output device settings and the project sample rate.
Here's the Gateway description of the soundcard:
NeoMagic NMA 2; 16 bit stereo audio, built-in OPL3 (FM synthesizer), built-in 3D enhanced controller; full duplex operation with two DMA channels; supports Sound Blaster and Sound Blaster Pro Game playback compatibility....Compression: ADPCM, ESPCM compression available for lower bit rates
modconf shows me I have the following sound modules installed:
When I boot the machine, I get these sound module messages:
sb: No ISAPnP cards found. trying started ones.
SB 3.01 detected OK (220)
sbP Interrupt test on IRQ7 failed--Probable IRQ conflict
SB: SDSP version is just 3.01 which means that your card is several years old (8 bit only device) or alternatively the sound driver is incorrectly configured.
I first tried sound without the sb modules, and the CD players still worked, but XMMS didn't make any sound at all.
I've tried replacing the OSS modules with ALSA, and that has given me the same results--CD player works, but .mp3 players give the "skipping" sound. I've also tried using Ubuntu, with kernel 2.6 and ALSA, and with the sound modules available in that release, I couldn't even get the speakers to beep or play audio CD's. I've tried using the Gnome desktop sound management and esound as well, but all my tweaking failed to make a difference with those programs.
I'd appreciate any advice or suggestions. Even commiseration would be welcome. Thanks!
I've had a similar issue with an older laptop, and it turned out to be a resource sharing problem.
You mentioned that you don't have a network card, but is the pcmcia service still starting? That's where my problem was - the pcmcia bridge and the soundcard were trying to share irq and io settings, and it didn't work well at all. A simple way to check would be to stop the pcmcia service from starting (man update-rc.d) and see if the issue still exists.
If that's the case, in the pcmcia config file (I believe it's /etc/pcmcia/config or config.opts), there should be a section relating to "don't use these irqs", or similar wording. There should also be a section in that file for io information as well. If you can stop the pcmcia bridge from using the shared resources, you should be able to stop the stuttering/scratching from the sound card.
Distribution: Mandriva mostly, vector 5.1, tried many.Suse gone from HD because bad Novell/Zinblows agreement
Posts: 1,606
Rep:
excellent idea that pcmcia shutdown.
I managed yesterday on an old PII setting up the OSS sound.
So I felt "maybe I can help"...
using cd was fine
using play, wav file played ok
using xine sound was so so, maybe scratch was not the word,
I thought this was to do with the graphic display of xine taking resource
But will stop pcmcia
Another idea
DMA
I think my card is set with dma1 0 and dma2 0
maybe drbootsie can improve dma settings? (I know very little on this)
but the skipping continues. Now, from looking at the /etc/pcmcia/config.options, sound is on irq 7, and irq 7 is excluded from pcmcia usage...
I know so little about pcmcia and dma--I've been googling and reading about pcmcia/sound card conflicts, and there are a lot of things I can try.
Next on my list, though, is to try WindowMaker instead of icewm, since the config.opt file asserts that there should be no conflict on irq 7....
Thanks for your suggestions. I'm really learning a lot, and isn't that what makes Linux fun? I'll report back when I've tried some more possible solutions.
In my situation, I couldn't just stop the service to see if that was the problem, I had to stop the service from starting in the first place, as in reboot and not have it come up at all.
Quote:
Now, from looking at the /etc/pcmcia/config.options, sound is on irq 7, and irq 7 is excluded from pcmcia usage...
There's also a section in there about io port usage as well. I was fortunate enough to come across this page which gave me a clue as to what might have been conflicting. You might have similar luck if you search for your model at the Linux on Laptops site.
Distribution: Mandriva mostly, vector 5.1, tried many.Suse gone from HD because bad Novell/Zinblows agreement
Posts: 1,606
Rep:
dvd playback on pentium II 300 MHz (side note)
Hi there, hope you are making progress.
I have not managed to find why sound was skipping in icewm and not windomaker.
I do not think I will try to find out for a long time.
As a side note, ~160 mb ram, pentium II 300 MHz,
mplayer *not* compiled from source
is there any chance to play a dvd with this gear or it is hopeless?
Any tricks?
The best I could come with was checking hdparm /dev/hdc was fine
and then in single mode (mplayer 1.07 or 1.03pre2 I think)
mplayer dvd://1 -framedrop -vc sound=30 -cache 8192 -vo vesa
(disabling zoom option in /etc/mplayer.conf or another conf file helped)
And this is not watchable: the sound is fine, but image so slow
- hardframedrop does not work
- increasing cache does not help
- video card is neomagic, but vesa mode works fine
Could not find a way to make the picture smaller during playback
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