After much tinkering around and much screwing up my system, I finally found something that actually worked and restored sound to my Suse 9.0 Laptop. Note, this is for users who previously had sound, and found that after upgrading to Suse 9.0 it had disspeared or been broken into a distorted mess of loops and chops.

Decided that since suse 8.2 worked, maybe it was something in the new kernel.
Went to suse.com. Download section. And downloaded the old kernel from 8.2... which can be found under the name k_deflt-2.4.20-62.i586.rpm.

Install kernel useing rpm -Uvh --oldpackage command.
Went to /boot/grub. Updated menu.lst so the initrd line reads initrd.shipped as the initrd image file.

Rebooted.

Enabled sound.

Everything works perfectly now Hope this solves a lot of frustration.

What functionality do you loose by going back to the old kernel?

None that I can find. Afterall, its still a 2.4 series kernel. The only difference between them is bug fix issues? Not like there's been a pile of new features from 2.4.20 to 2.4.21... All my hardware still works including all the new suse config features with NFS and samba and the whole mess.

Well, I upgraded the kernel from 2.4 to 2.6 because of a driver issue with my sis900 ethernet card. Now I can get online, but I all of a sudden have no sound (I used to on the default suse9 install), and my sound chipset does not get recognized anymore. Of course, I need the net more than the sound, but it's 2003 damnit, and I want both!
Anyone ever encountered this or should I just wait until suse makes a final 2.6 rpm?

FSC Amilo D1840 latop.

Actually I lost all sound support with 2.6 also. I figured its due to the change in the kernel sound drivers, along with some of the basic re-structuring.

As for the final rpm. Hope your not holding your breath. They've got no reason to release one for 9.0 when they could turn it into a 9.1 release, now featuring kernel 2.6 for greater speed and stability...

Caeda,

Is there a way for me to have both kernels installed so I dont have to reinstall everything if I screw it up again.

Thanks,

Lee

No. There isnt.

Holy Crap I been google! :-D

Was searching for something else for Suse and this popped up as result 20!

I Generally have at least two separate kernels installed. there is no reason you can't have both 2.4.22 and 2.60-xxx installed at the same time.

And out of curiousity why not compile a kernel that supports both instead of waiting for someone else to do it? should only take 30 -45 minutes, only 5 on your part..

I have found my fix and I did not have to downgrade my kernel. I have noticed that My firewire and soundcard is on irq 10. I rarely use my firewire in linux. So I figured I would just disable the firewire card since I figured that may be the cause of my soundcard problem. So.....

WooHoo, In yaSt under editor for /etc/sysconfig files, I found where I can disable the entries for hotplug firewire. As soon as I disabled the firewire and installed the soundcard again, shazam no stuttering soundcard.

Wow. Talk about stepping right over the obvoius...
Did a clean install, watched the first 4 lines that popped up upon booting..
"PCI-Linx IRQ10...
blah blah IRQ5
blah blah IRQ8
blah blah IRQ10...

So its not the sound cards fault. Its toshiba for using the same irq for 2 different devices, and suse was letting them fairly compete! Yeah for sound with the better updated kernel!

It doesn't seem to be totally Toshiba's problem. When I look at the settings in XP, firewire is at IRQ4 and the sound is at IRQ7. In Suse 9 they are both at IRQ10, hence the conflict. Is there some way to change the IRQ of firewire so we can get it all working?