setup problems: toshiba satellite A75 running mandrake 10
 

i am dual booting mandrake 10 and windows xp on this laptop. linux installed easily but i am unable to get sound to work. it seems like no driver is available for the integrated audio on this laptop. the chip in the machine is a realtek ALS250 and i did some searching and kept coming back to AC'97 drivers. i attempted to install these but they wont compile. the compiler looks for version.h can is unable to find it. i also keep getting sent back to the alsa project but am unsure where to progress from there. harddrakle is no help. and advice on how to get sound working and how to get my compiler, gcc, to work would be greatly appreciated.

also, i am unable to get my touchpad working so i donloaded tpconfigure. on the tp configure webpage it is reccomended that this is put in a startup script, which is something that i do not know how to do. is anyone familiar with tpconfigure?

thanks in advance,
d. mcquown

how to get sound and touchpad working on Toshiba A75
 

Hi,

I'm able to get sound and the touchpad working on the Toshiba A75. I'm using Slackware 10 but this might be helpful:

Sound
As you say, sound is AC 97, but the exact driver needed is snd-atiixp (apparently there are several chipsets/modules associated with AC97). Try to insmod or modprobe snd-atiixp and sound should work. I had a problem in Slackware with the module snd-atiixp-modem also getting loaded and messing up the sound, so I added that to /etc/hotplug/blacklist, restarted, made sure the snd-atiixp module was getting loaded, and sound worked.

Touchpad
This worked for me in the xorg.conf file:
Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Mouse0"
Driver "mouse"
Option "CorePointer"
Option "Protocol" "auto"
Option "Device" "/dev/mouse"
Option "Emulate3Buttons" "true"
Option "Emulate3Timeout" "50" # timeout in milliseconds (default is 50ms)
Option "ZAxisMapping" "4 5"
Option "SendCoreEvents" "true"
EndSection

More notes on setting up this laptop at:
http://jmccoy.sdf-us.org/slackware10/toshiba-a75.php

If you have any more tips on it, please let me know, jeffmccoy@yahoo.com

I'm having trouble with sound on this laptop as well (Satellite A75-S206). I've compiled and installed the drivers, added snd-atiixp-modem to the blacklist, and ran alsaconf, and alsamixer. I've also rebooted, ran modprobe sound and modprobe snd_atiixp, but still get no sound. I'm running Mandrake 10 like thiqued is.

okay
 

I have actually since made the transition to Slackware and I find that I like it better. However, I found that i got better resutlts by blacklisting both snd-atiixp and snd-atiixp-modem and then running modprobe snd-atiixp in a startup script. Just like jeffmccoy reccomended on his webpage. Now, when you say you aren't getting sound, do you mean that the sound server crashes and you get an error message or that you simply cannot hear the sound?

I'm not getting any error messages, I just don't hear anything. I have tried putting both the atiixp's into the blacklist, and putting the correct one in the script that jeffmccoy said to on his site. (and rebooting) I have noticed now that alsaconf doesn't seem to change /etc/modules.conf (I do select Yes I want it to modify the file). Should it be adding anything to it?
This is all I have on my modules.conf(the same before and after running alsaconf.
Thanks for your help so far. :)

PS: To see if audio is working I've been trying to play an MP3. Totem starts playing it, without any error messages. However, when I start Audacity I do get an error message.