Slack 9 and Toshiba Satellite Pro 6100
 

I seem to be having some rather unique problems with my Toshiba Satellite Pro 6100.

I'm running Slackware 9 with kernel 2.4.20. The laptop's sound board uses the Intel 810 driver and my GPU is the NVidia GeForce4 420 Go. Sound *sort of* works with the OSS drivers built into the kernel but it really isn't great. In fact, I'm pretty sure it's the culprit causing 3D games like Quake III and Half-Life (through Winex) to freeze when they get to a 3D rendered screen. They just freeze, and I have to switch over to TTY6 and killall -9 quake3.x86. :O\ When I start Arts or play a music file to tie up the sound card, everything works fine and no freezies. I somehow got it into my head that switching to ALSA might fix at least some of my problems. I hear the ALSA drivers are much further along than the OSS ones and.. uh... not "cursed." ;O) So I downloaded ALSA 0.9 and compiled it "--with-cards=intel8x0 --with-sequencer=yes --with-oss=yes." When I reboot, however, Arts gives me an error "SNDCTL_DSP_SETFMT failed - invalid argument." I try using mpg123 and it gives me the error "libao - OSS cannot set channels to 2." I've Googled the web and groups until my fingers are blue with any number of keywords and I can't seem to get any closer to a solution. Does anyone out there have a similar experience and if so, how was it resolved? Thank anyone who reads this for their time and I would be most grateful for any assistance.

My modules.conf:

#Infra-red
pre-install smc-ircc /usr/sbin/irdasetup --dma=1 --irq=10 --firbase=0x130 --sirbase=0x2e8
alias char-major-10-181 toshiba

#CD Burner
options ide-cd ignore=hdc
alias scd0 sr_mod
pre-install sg modprobe ide-scsi
pre-install sr_mod modprobe ide-scsi
pre-install ide-scsi modprobe ide-cd

#Sound
alias char-major-116 snd
alias snd-card-0 snd-intel8x0
options snd major=116 cards_limit=1 device_mode=0777 device_gid=29 device_uid=0
alias char-major-14 soundcore
alias sound-slot-0 snd-card-0
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
alias sound-service-1-0 off
alias sound-slot-1 off
alias /dev/dsp snd-pcm-oss
alias /dev/mixer snd-mixer-oss
alias /dev/midi snd-seq-oss

#Video
alias char-major-195 nvidia

I have a 5005-S507, and I experiece the same problems, however, I've been using linux on it for Almost a year and a half (since it came onto the market), so I've been able to find out some info on why it happens.

As near as I can tell, OSS, ALSA, ARTS, no matter what you end up using your gonna get some freezeups on wine and winex. When I try to trace it down it seems to lead to the ACPI settings of the sound card. Since the Toshiba soundcards on the higher models support acpi events, they are kind of buggy when they are in linux.

So, basically. Alsa wont help you much. :( Kernel 2.6 might help both of us. I added you to my AOL account, using the info in your profile and will try helping you live when I see ya come on. ;)

Thanks again for all the help, I really appreciate it it! ^_^ It's a real shame there's no real support as of yet... Well, one can always have their hopes. Silent Q3 is really just fine actually... I can play MP3s on XMMS and it seems to work... Hmmm...

try suse