Sound on a Thinkpad 390

whaase · 05-15-2004, 03:04 PM

Well, I know i'm not the first to ask. I've done many searches, but most threads never got finished or they got it to work by accedent. So here is my question. I have a IBM Thinkpad 390, with a Neomagic 256av sound/video card. I've tried just about every driver I could find that was mentioned. The only one I can even get close to working is the sb driver. All other drivers don't even allow me to mess with the mixer. SB driver atleast let's me do that much. But, I get a error when the card is getting initialized. Something about "asked for 16 got 8" error.... and set's it to the null device.
This is the only thing holding me back from wiping out windows on my laptop and I'm getting frusterated! I'm using a Debian based distro. I've checked out http://www.linux-laptop.net/ but to no avail. Anyone have suggestions? I'm getting tired of rebooting after every try. I'll post any info asked for.... heck, if you think you can do it I'll consider letting you ssh in!

More info:

/sbin/modprobe nm256_audio

no errors.

I edited the /etc/modutils/sound to look like this

# ALSA portion
alias char-major-116 snd
alias snd-card-0 nm256_audio

# 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

I then did a 'update-modules' to get the modules.conf updated with the new info.

I get the following popup from artsmessage when I reboot into KDE.

Sound server informational message:
Error while initializing the sound driver:
Can't set playback format (_format = -1, asked driver to give 16, got 8)
The sound server will continue, using the null output device.

Thanks, Walter

wes103 · 03-17-2005, 08:06 AM

Ok, it's been a little while since the original post, but I've had lots of fits getting ALSA to run on my TP 390 too. I have finally figured it out.

The TP 390 outwardly appears to have a Neomagic 256AV chipset in it, but whatever IBM did to it, you have to use the OPL3SA2 driver to get sound. The OPL3SA2 driver included in the kernel, the OSS one, works fine. However, the one included in ALSA does not. The reason is that if your kernel was compiled with Plug-and-Play support, the ALSA driver assumes this means the sound chipset also. This is not true of the TP390. You have IRQ and I/O settings in your BIOS, it is not PnP. Thus, the ALSA driver decides there is no sound chipset.

After sifting through the ALSA code for a while, I found the solution. There is a rather undocumented module parameter to disable the PnP functionality in the driver, called isapnp. My modprobe lines for the driver look like this:

Code:

modprobe snd-opl3sa2 port=0x120 dma1=0 dma2=1 irq=5 wss_port=0x530 fm_port=-1 midi_port=-1 isapnp=0
modprobe snd-mixer-oss
modprobe snd-pcm-oss

I now have ALSA sound on my Thinkpad 390. Good luck to whoever is still using theirs, it is a reliable system.

-Bill