Still not working....

I just noticed this thread reappear in my record of previous posts. It looks like the ground has shifted to a driver config problem. I think the modules.conf.local file must be a SuSE special, as I don't have one here.

Normally running the command 'depmod -a' will update the module dependency data and get rid of the the 'newer than' warnings. Also I suspect the only reason to use the .local file is that SuSE may rewrite modules.conf at some stage, and your edits will be lost. I don't know if depmod will cure your other problem.

You don't give much info about what error messages you got. Did you just add those 2 lines to the .local file?

If you are using KDE it is probably also worth poking around in the control center under 'sound and multimedia' for some sign of your keyboard.

I can't tell what the problem is, really, so if you think driver, I'll work with you on this angle.My bad. I used to remember to run depmod, but did not run it then, nor have I run depmod -a since then. Maybe that gets rid of the boot time warnings, but for the sessions where I ran without depmod -a, I still could not connect to the keyboard. The depmod angle is a good reminder but not the core of the problem.Agreed.Really, I practically did give the error message, almost word for word. Your observation of me needing to run depmod -a is, I suspect, dead on.

I've since upgraded to SuSe 9.1 Pro, will try again when I get the time.Looking for what... Multimedia devices? MIDI Devices? Needing what stuff loaded into the system - maybe a drivers listing for a working MIDI setup would help here. The keyboard is generic MIDI, from what little I can learn about it.

I have no claims at all to be an expert on this stuff. My only knowledge about MIDI and Linux comes from playing with software MIDI synth.

But the crucial thing in getting any piece of hardware to work is to load the right driver, and in the case of old hardware like this you usually have to pass in some parameters, like IRQ number and IO range, typically set in the modules.conf file, as the hardware is too dumb to negotiate this data itself.

The KDE (3.2) control centre certainly has some MIDI settings under Sound & Multimedia, but maybe only for choosing the playback device.

The drivers are already loaded: MPU401 is there, and the proper sound card entry is also there (sound plays fine). The issue, as I stated in the subject line of the first post, is: "I would like to test an unknown midi device" because the alsa connections tool seems to find a device, connects the thing it sees, but the MIDI keyboard does not send anything into the connected software synth. Nor does connecting the keyboard work in any other fashion. The keyboard came with Windows software that does not see the keyboard... but the keyboards software was VERY old (needed Windows 3.1), and all I have for Windows is Millennium Edition. The software never saw the keyboard there either.

The best possible solution here, I think, would be if I can open the midi ports' data stream and tee it to std out, or dump to a file or similar. That way, if I had an amount of certainty that the test method has to produce something which I can see as data, then I'd know whether the keyboard is even communicating at all.

If I have a dead MIDI keyboard, I could correctly configure all the drivers in the world but if the dead keyboard won't communicate, well, I'm nowhere. I just need an example of someone already doing this (and a brief post of their capture would be especially helpful), before I can be sure the keyboard is dead.

FWIW but no real answers
 

For whatever anyone can get from this:

At some point, I installed either SuSe 9.2 Pro or SuSe 9.3 Pro, that old Reveal keyboard worked fine in the included versions of Hydrogen and Soundtracker.

I can only offer that SuSe Pro had added something to the included YaST that did the job for the Pro version, where my first version of SuSe used a version of YaST which failed to set all the neccessary things in order.

I have always wondered, ever since I got things working, that maybe I only needed a permissions change or maybe I only needed to make some missing file link... That's the downside to having and relying on any GUI based system setup tools: the user of those GUI tools can succeed in making stuff work, yet he/she remains clueless regarding the details of proper configuration.

:twocents: