Hi!

I'm trying to configure my Abit IS7 motherboard to produce sound output through it's SPDIF port on my Mandrake 9.1 system. So far, it's been a real pain in the neck. (I've spent about 6 hours on this one thing so far...)

The IS7 uses an Intel ICH5 for sound generation and a Realtek ALC650 codec. This is supported in ALSA using the snd-intel8x0 driver, but apparently not completely in version 0.9.0rc0, which is what Mandrake 9.1 includes. Abit has version 0.9.2 of the alsa-driver package on their site -- it's the only linux driver they even list.

Unfortunately, while I can compile and successfully install that package without error, and have setup the modules.conf file correctly based on their notes, the ALSA docs, and a variety of postings here and elsewhere, and regardless of any tweaking I do to the mixer settings, I get absolutely no sound out of the machine. The modprobe reports no errors.

I also tried downloading and installing version 0.9.6 of alsa-driver, alsa-lib, and alsa-utils, and again, despite no errors, it didn't produce sound.

Now here's a weirdness -- Throughout this whole process, every time I booted the machine, it said ALSA 0.9.0rc0 was loaded. This makes me think that somehow, despite the make install reporting no errors, it's not actually overwriting the alsa drivers.

Does anyone have any ideas on what I might need to do to get this working?

Thanks,
-->Zgwortz

If you do get it working, would you please PM me and let me know what you did? I have an Abit NF7-S and a Logitech 5.1 sound system, which only works under Mandrake Linux with the input set to the normal Sterio 2X mode. When I change the input to Optical, I too get nothing but silence. Everything works fine under Windows so I know it's not the setup.

I finally managed to get that working by replacing the ALSA code in the kernel source tree and rebuilding the kernel, although I might have been able to get it working by just rebuilding the kernel image that lilo loads after building/installing ALSA. It then took quite a bit of fiddling about with the ALSA mixer to get it all sounding right.

Mandrake 9.2rc2 got sound mostly working on my board without having to do anything but muck with the mixer, so you might want to wait until 9.2 final comes out and try that.

-->Zgwortz
(P.S. For some reason, it wouldn't let me PM you...)