I recently bought an Acer 3661 laptop for work. Unfortunately I cannot get the soundcard working. I have tried quite a few different distros, mostly Debian based like Mepis, Knoppix, kUbuntu, and I've tried Lunar as well (compiled my own kernel and alsa-lib).
My sound card is a Realtek HD card with the stupid ALC883 chip on it. It uses the kernel modules snd_hda_codec + snd_hda_intel and even with the new alsa driver (1.0.13) that is supposed to support my card it doesn't work.

I'm just wondering, before installing Slackware, which I like on my desktop but haven't yet tried on my lappy, has anyone here tried to configure this soundcard using Slackware? and if so, did you have any luck?

Thanks in advance.

How doesn't work? alsa can't find your sound card? modules don't load? modules load but no sound?

hi randomsel

The soundcard is detected by alsa when I load the snd-hda-intel module. When doing this however I get various different errors with different kernels. This is all using alsa-lib 1.0.13:

With a 2.6.16 kernel I get "azx_get_response timeout" repeatedly and my system doesn't boot up.

Using a 2.6.17 kernel I get "azx_get_response timeout, switching to single_cmd mode..." closely followed by "hda_codec: num_steps = 0 for NID=0x9", which happens continuously. When I get into the system it behaves normally but, regardlessly of if it believes it's pumping out sound, it's still silent.
Edit: At the moment with this one I'm also getting: "hda_codec: Unknown model for ALC883, trying auto-probe from BIOS..."

With 2.6.18 (which I compiled myself) I get "azx_get_response timeout, switching to single_cmd mode..." but it's is worse than with 2.6.17 because when I load alsamixer I don't have a Master volume or PCM, which means no control and no function at all.


I want to stress still that I've actually got Debian (testing)installed on that computer at the moment and I'm wondering if any slackware user has had the same problem as I don't wish to install yet another distro if that wont help.

Slackware is a beauty. As usual it was the only distro I could solve my problem with.
Just gotta get wireless working now...

In case you're wondering, it was just a case of removing alsa, reinstalling it from source and sorting out which modules are loaded at boot. Please contact me for further details if required.

I have a ALC880 running, but I think that the ALC883 has to be configured in another way. I have a copy since the days of configuring my ALC880, which may help you ...

"Try this patch

as root: cd /root && mkdir alsa
then go to the alsa dir and download the tarball for:
cd alsa && wget ftp://ftp.alsa-project.org/pub/drive....12rc3.tar.bz2
untar it and go to the new dir: tar xjf alsa-driver-1.0.12rc3.tar.bz2 && cd alsa-driver-1.0.12rc3
then path the sources: patch -p1 < /where/is/your/patch/acer.patch
compile it: ./hgcompile --with-cards=hda-intel && make && make install
then run the alsaconfig too, and at the end look where it record the conf: alsaconf
after, edit the file configured by alsaconfig (for exemple): vi /etc/modules.d/alsa
and put this line: options snd-hda-intel model=ACER
then reboot and that should work

FROM and more info here :
https://bugtrack.alsa-project.org/al...ew.php?id=2104
https://bugtrack.alsa-project.org/al...ew.php?id=2261"

I don't know from where I copied it.

My configuration in /etc/modprobe.conf (or /etc/modprobe.d/sound):

# ALSA portion
alias char-major-116 snd
alias snd-card-0 snd-hda-intel
# module options should go here
options snd-hda-intel model=auto position_fix=1

# OSS/Free portion
alias char-major-14 soundcore
alias sound-slot-0 snd-card-0

# card #1
alias sound-service-0-0 snd-mixer-oss
alias sound-service-0-1 snd-seq-oss
alias sound-service-0-3 snd-pcm-oss
alias sound-service-0-8 snd-seq-oss
alias sound-service-0-12 snd-pcm-oss

Just to give you an information how I did the setup for the ALC880 ...

Fluxx.

I was getting lines of the form:

hda_intel: azx_get_response timeout

in my logs as well (and no sound output for my Intel Corporation 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Family) High Definition Audio Controller (rev 03)). I fixed this by adding the "options snd-hda-intel probe_mask=1" to my /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base file (in Kubuntu). Some others have also reported success with "probe_mask=8" or "model=3stack". I've not needed the "model=3stack" option, probably because I get

in my logs.