What happened Håkan? Did you get the thinkpad up and running? and with sound? I tried a new install of SuSE 9.2 personal, and it didnt work all that well with the laptop and it was still seeing the sound card as a CS4610 which I know to be the wrong driver. So hope you can help me out, and if you do I promise to write and post an indept article on how to cofigure a soundcard on a 600E thinkpad with Linux.
Wavz

I finally got it up and running!!!!!!!!!!!! and to Tell the truth, it wasnt all that hard to do. Here are the steps to help out any one who couldn't find the info like I couldnt.

1.Open the Konsole or what ever terminal you prefer.
2. SU mode
3.type in "alsaconf" without the quotation marks
4.The ALSA Configurator should start up.
5.Just follow the instructions on screen
6.Search Sounds Cards (ok)
7.After the search it should say that, and I quote "looks like you are having a Thinkpad 600e". And "Should I try to snd-cs4236 driver & probe the legacy configuration? (ok)
8.Probing the legacy ISA cards might take some time? (ok)
9.Please select the drivers to probe?
[x]cs4236 Cirrus Logic CS4236-9
(ok)
10.then it should start to probe for the card and driver. This step should take some time.
11.Configuring snd-cs4236
do you want to modify /ect/modprobe.d/sound? (ok)
12.Ok the snd-cs4236 is configured
13.ALSA Configurator will prepare the card for playing now? (ok)
14.The mixer is now set up for playing. Shall I try to play a sample sound now? (ok)
15. you should hear a small song at this point, and if all is well it should say'
Now ALSA is now ready to use
Have a lot of fun!

Then in the control panel I had to go into sounds and multimedia
Then Sound system
Then Hardware
Then to Select the audio device
and change this to Advanced Linux Sound Architecture
save those changes
Then you have to make sure to go into Kmix or the volume control you use under KDE or Gnome
Then test it out with a CD
I did have to play around with the MUTE buttons on Kmix, but after a while Bingo I had it singing like a bird.

This whole set up worked with SuSE 9.1 personal edt.
Kernel 2.5.6-7
KDE 3.2.1

I hope this has helped you out
Wavz

Actually I got my Thinkpad up and running yesterday and had set aside an hour or two this afternoon to have a look at the Alsa configuration again, but it seems you solved it yourself. :)

Do yourself a favour and back up that configuration file! :)


Håkan

How would I go about doing that? Never done that before :)
Wavz

You could copy the file /etc/modprobe.d/sound to somewhere safe. From your post above it seems that's the file your distribution stores the Alsa configuration.


Håkan

Well I just upgraded to SuSE 9.2 and things havent been better. After I ran alsaconf under 9.2 the sound configuration stays even after shutdowns or suspends. Thank you for all your help Håkan, I hope that alot more people with this same problem find this thread.
Wavz

There is a quick dirty and easy way to do this, now for me it worked but for some reason every time i reboot i have to rerun alsaconf for the sound to work and sometimes i get crazy feedback when i boot because it turns the microphone on and it directly feeds to the speaks so i get this high pitched squal out of the one working speaker haha. Well i hope this works better for you.

1.Turn your computer off.
2.Hold down F1 and turn your computer on.
3.When in the bios go to the first selection called Config
4.Now go to the last selection called initialize and select that
5.When its done initializing press the restart button (its either in the config menu or the main one before that)
6.Now boot into linux and you should be able to alsaconf just fine
7.Reboot agian and go into the bios and go into config agian and then go to quick boot and make sure its OFF, it should be on so turn it off and press the reboot button.
8.Everything should work fine now!

now if you cant alsaconf the first time out of the bios redo that step but instead of just initializing turn quick boot off then reboot.

well thats what did it for me (kinda hehe)
im going to try to hardcode my irq, dma etc etc to see if my sound will work after that :S

Hope this works for you guys!