I have an ACER Travelmate laptop with an IXP150 AC'97 sound card, and I've been having sound-related problems for a long time. I recently upgraded to OpenSuse 11.0 (new installation) but that didn't solve the problem.

When I log in, sometimes I can hear the greeting sound, but it suddenly stops and then there is no sound at all. For example, MPlayer talks about broken pipe in AO_ALSA. I have to restart the soundcard with "rcalsasound restart".
Sometimes I don't hear the greeting sound at all, I do have sound, but knotify eats 99% CPU... strange that it behaves differently every time.

Skype doesn't work. I can login, I can set the sound options, sometimes I can even have a good test sound, but during the test call I don't hear anything starting from the ringing. And skype seems to block sound: if I try to run mplayer, it says that device is busy. In skype I get error messages like this:

ALSA lib pcm.c:2202:(snd_pcm_open_noupdate) Unknown PCM cards.pcm.hdmi
RtApiAlsa: callback thread error (RtApiAlsa: audio write error for device (ATI IXP (hw:IXP,0)): Exec format error.) ... closing stream.

However, the problem seems to be more general than only a skype bug. I've tried to search the forums, and I've tried quite a few things, I installed the newest alsa (which I could through yast), alsa-firmware, I blacklisted the snd_atiixp_modem module, I played around with the options (ac97_codec=0 etc.) in /etc/modprobe.d/sound...

My kernel is 2.6.27.7-9-default.
Here are my sound setting details (outputs of tsalsa and alsa-info.sh):

http://nopaste.com/p/atpI1OFMgb
http://www.alsa-project.org/db/?f=0d...8afb85ecbd68db

lspci output:

00:00.0 Host bridge: ATI Technologies Inc Radeon 9100 IGP Host Bridge (rev 02)
00:01.0 PCI bridge: ATI Technologies Inc Radeon 9100 IGP AGP Bridge
00:13.0 USB Controller: ATI Technologies Inc OHCI USB Controller #1 (rev 01)
00:13.1 USB Controller: ATI Technologies Inc OHCI USB Controller #2 (rev 01)
00:14.0 SMBus: ATI Technologies Inc SMBus (rev 16)
00:14.1 IDE interface: ATI Technologies Inc Dual Channel Bus Master PCI IDE Controller
00:14.3 ISA bridge: ATI Technologies Inc Device 434c
00:14.4 PCI bridge: ATI Technologies Inc IXP200 3COM 3C920B Ethernet Controller
00:14.5 Multimedia audio controller: ATI Technologies Inc IXP150 AC'97 Audio Controller
00:14.6 Modem: ATI Technologies Inc IXP AC'97 Modem (rev 01)
01:05.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc M9+ 5C61 [Radeon Mobility 9200 (AGP)] (rev 01)
02:00.0 FireWire (IEEE 1394): VIA Technologies, Inc. VT6306 Fire II IEEE 1394 OHCI Link Layer Controller (rev 80)
02:02.0 Ethernet controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL8180L 802.11b MAC (rev 20)
02:03.0 Ethernet controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL-8139/8139C/8139C+ (rev 10)
02:04.0 CardBus bridge: ENE Technology Inc CB1420 Cardbus Controller (rev 02)
02:04.1 CardBus bridge: ENE Technology Inc CB1420 Cardbus Controller (rev 02)
02:0b.0 USB Controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82xxxxx UHCI USB 1.1 Controller (rev 50)
02:0b.1 USB Controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82xxxxx UHCI USB 1.1 Controller (rev 50)
02:0b.2 USB Controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. USB 2.0 (rev 51)

Any help would really be appreciated.

At the terminal try doing the following.

mplayer -ao oss file

If it displays that something is using it, turn off software mixers such as artsd.

I recommend download the experimental version of ALSA (drivers, libraries, utilities) and test again. The firmware is for USB and other sound devices that require to be programed before use.

Create a bug report about the problem. It should eventually be fixed.

If anything fails, you may have to use a skype phone. For general audio use, you may have to get an external sound card.

In the future, do research on what notebooks seems to work in Linux with out any problems. ASUS and MSI notebooks seems to have less problems. IMHO, You get what you paid for when buying Acer products. It seems Acer is completely Windows dependent.

Thank you for your suggestions!

I can use mplayer after "rcalsasound restart" and using -vo x11.
Skype I can't use at all.

But I noticed some very weird thing.
I tried to play the test melody in Yast>sound card>other> volume control, and the sound suddenly stops when I move the mouse! I checked what dmesg had to say about this:

ATI IXP AC97 controller 0000:00:14.5: PCI INT B disabled
ATI IXP AC97 controller 0000:00:14.5: PCI INT B -> GSI 17 (level, low) -> IRQ 17

After "rcalsasound restart" I can play the test sound again.
Isn't this a sign of interrupt problems?

I have the latest version of alsa (1.0.19) and I also had this kind of strange behaviour already in SuSE10...