SIS7019 audio driver for 12.1? Please?
 

I have a Norhtec Microclient Jr. that I'm searching for a good Linux distrib for. This is a fairly underpowered machine (200MHz cpu, 128mb RAM) but Slackware 12.1 with fluxbox and the huge.s kernel seems to work okay with it. It's not exactly what you'd call peppy, but it seems adequate for my purposes.

About the only thing I'm missing at this point is a driver for the audio chip. It's an SIS7019, and I believe there's source for the driver in the latest ALSA source tarball. Now, ordinarily I'd just compile and install this thing myself, but as I mentioned, this is a fairly underpowered machine, and the compile process dies due to lack of memory. Er, at least I assume it's lack of memory. The error message is:

gcc: Internal error: Killed (program cc1)
Please submit a full bug report.
See <URL:http://gcc.gnu.org/bugs.html> for instructions.

So, I was wondering whether some kind soul would be able to compile the ALSA driver for the SIS7019 for me? Pretty please? This is just a stock Slackware 12.1 installation running the huge.s kernel. Um, I think that makes it kernel version 2.6.24.5. I'd be ever so grateful.

Thanks.

Doug

As noone seems to have the current alsa compiled, the easiest solution for you would be to boot to runlevel 3 and build alsa yourself. Without having X using lots of memory, and, on such a processor, cpu time, it's gonna be a one-nighter.

Good luck ;)

Thanks for the suggestion, General. I had actually already tried that, with no luck. I've also tried playing around with nice and adding roughly 1Gb of (rather slow) swap to the system, again with no luck. I get that same error every time.

Ordinarily I would try moving the hard drive it's installed on to another system for compiling, but the "hard drive" for this system is just a 4Gb CF card, and I don't have another machine handy where I can boot that from. I have tried copying the entire system to a 4Gb USB drive and then starting that from Slackware's boot USB image. The boot image does recognize the 4Gb drive, but sadly, it contains no /dev/sd* devices, so I can't actually chroot or pass root=<whatever> as a boot parm or anything. There's just no way to get to the 4Gb drive from the boot image. Pretty frustrating. I guess I could try rebuilding the initrd with the necessary /dev/sd* devices, but I've never successfully built a ramdisk before. That'll be, umm, I think I'm up to Plan Q now. :-)

My next bright idea is to try to install LILO on the 4Gb USB disk and try to boot my big desktop computer from that, but I haven't had a lot of luck to date with either LILO or GRUB on USB drives. I guess we'll see what happens.

Doug

Well, I managed to get Slackware 12.1 booted up on another machine with more memory, and I was able to compile the SIS7019 alsa kernel module. Unfortunately, it won't load. The error message (from dmesg) is

version magic '2.6.24.5-smp SMP mod_unload 686 ' should be '2.6.24.5 mod unload 486 '

I understand this error message to mean that the kernel module was compiled for the smp version of the kernel, and I'm booting using the huge.s kernel because the smp kernel causes my machine to hang.

The thing is, I don't see how I can get this thing to compile for a non-smp kernel. I've tried all the options for configure that I can think of. I don't have the smp kernel-headers package installed. The only thing I can think of to do is to install a non-smp version of the kernel source, but none of the Slackware distribution sites I've seen provide such a thing. The only version of the kernel source I can find is the kernel-source-2.6.24.5_smp-noarch-2 package.

Can someone help? Suggestions? Anything?

<Sigh> Never mind. I discovered the patch-to-non-smp.sh script and the associated diff file. That seems to do the trick. Sorry for the bother.

Doug