Dell Latitude CPi A400XT : 2.6 kernel : NeoMagic Audio
 

Exact Model: Dell Latitude CPi A400XT
BIOS Rev: A09

Under 2.6 series, everything about this laptop works FINE under the 2.6 kernel (and faster to boot!) except....

yup... you guessed it....

SOUND!

I cannot, for the life of me, get this sound "card" working under the 2.6-series kernels, using ALSA or OSS-emulation. I have attempted this on Slackware-current, Debian Sarge, and Fedora Core 1.

Things I have tried (using 2.6.1, 2.6.3, and 2.6.4):
- built ALSA and OSS into kernel
- built ALSA and OSS as modules
- built sound support in, no ALSA or OSS; built ALSA drivers from ALSA's driver page
- built sound support in, no OSS, ALSA only; built ALSA drivers from ALSA's driver page
- more combinations that I can remember

I have now cleanly recompiled both the kernels and ALSA[-drivers,-libs,-utils,-tools,-oss] close to 13 or 14 times, with different combinations. I have tried every single recommendation i have found on the net for this chipset for the module loading parameters, including hw-tph's recommendation/config file for trying the cs4237 driver instead.

At this point, I don't care if it's OSS or ALSA - I'd like ALSA, but beggers can't be choosers.

Any help in this is appreciated.

Carefully examine the errors you get when you try loading the module. It's been quite a while since I wrote that and several parameters have changed names. Use modinfo (followed by the module name) to find out the available parameters for the module, and it's also useful to view the last few lines of output from dmesg after each try as it often has more verbous explanations of what went wrong.

The Yahoo group dell-linux-laptops might be worth searching too, they have an awful lot of helpful people there with the same hardware as you.


Håkan

Neomagic Audio
 

I too have the same problem with my neomagic card. But however I get no error messages. Any insight on this matter would be greatly appreciated. Thanks


-kp

Sorry to bring this back from the "dead" and the delay in posts...

I've opted to just wait things out on 2.6... I'm planning on replacing this laptop soon (5 year old full-time use laptop is now having hardware problems - go fig). I'm specifically looking for a non NeoMagic audio based system (like the ThinkPad T20 series).

Using the latest 2.4 release (2.4.25 at time of writing) seems to work VERY well, and the sound support is just THERE. It's not worth loosing hair at this point to get 2.6 running. If it ain't broke don't fix it, right?

Hakan, thank you again, for your insight.

Just to let you all know, I have goten sound to work in 2.6.5. If there was anything wrong it seems to be fixed now.
--kp

Any insight into getting it to work? Anything special or just load the modules and you're good to go?