Sound and ACPI issues in Slack 10
 

Hi folks

I am having some issues with Slack 10 on my laptop. (I have a perfectly fine Slack-Current Install (June 04) but use a couple of empty partitions to "tinker with" The latest Slack and Mepis offerings.)


SOUND

As expected, there was no sound when booting into the system for the first time. Running the "alsaconf" command went smoothly. However, after logging off and returning to the command prompt, the screen becomes filled with the following line:

ALSA lib pcm-hw.c:549(snd_pcm_hw_start) SNDRV_PCM_IOCTL_START failed: Broken Pipe

I am able to get sound while playing music CD's and DVD's. However, at lower volumes the sound quality is extremely poor - really fuzzy. While any media is playing, that fuzzy sound can be heard even when the volume controls are set to their lowest levels.

I have noticed also, that the KDE Startup tune does not come on either. Similarly, running any of *.wav files in the /opt/kde/share/sounds folder produces no sound.

Volume control works ok under KMix but running either the "amixer" or "alsamixer" commands just results in a "no mixer elements found" message.

It is worthy to point out, that I had no such problems using Slack-Current (up to June 4th).


ACPI

I have been trying for the longest while to get ACPI to work on Slack-Current and now 10 with no success. I have read from numerous sources that a /proc/acpi directory (containing subdirectories with files for battery, cpu monitoring etc) will be created when an ACPI enabled kernel is installed on a machine with an ACPI capable BIOS. I have installed/re-installed unofficial Slack-Current and and now Slack 10.0 ISO's (using the 2.4.26 bareacpi.i kernel) but never got this /proc/acpi directory. I have even compiled and run a custom kernel with ACPI enabled but still got no /proc/acpi directory. In all cases, there would be just an /etc/acpi directoy with just one files ("events" and "acpi_handler.sh" if I can remember correctly).

Can anyone help with these sound issues and/or have been able to get ACPI to work on Slack using kernel 2.4.26? I really need this ACPI part because the notebooks gets a bit hot and the noise from the fans is a bit annoying too. Before anyone suggests it, I have tried kernel 2.6.7 but have had no joy there either. Not only that I have no sound and /proc/acpi directory but the "tap-to-click" feature on the synaptics touchpad does not work whereas it works flawlessly in 2.4.26. So I will steer clear of 2.6.x at the moment.

Thanks for any help in advance.

Regards


Notebook (Relevant Specs)

Model: Sagernotebook NP5620
Processor: P4 2.0 GHz
Installed Ram: 512MB
HD: 40GB
Audio Chip: ALC201 AC'97 Audio CODEC
BIOS: Phoenix 4.0 Release 6

dizzi; U may have to scroll a bit but here goes; http://tldp.org/HOWTO/HOWTO-INDEX section 5 single list Page1 at ACPI and page 45 of 56pp,s Sound HowTo.

dizzi; check http://tldp.org/HOWTO/HOWTO-INDEX section5 Page1 of 56pp,s ACPI-HOWTO and page45 of 56pp,s. Sound HOWTO.

Thanks Penguin, the info from the links are quite extensive indeed - especially the ACPI coverage. I try to implement the procedures to see how things will turn out. My sound issues though does not seem to be addressed. As pointed out earlier, they only surfaced in Slack -Current recently (post June 4th) and in Slack 10.

More help is still welcomed :-)

The sound didn't work on my laptop either when I first installed 10. When I ran alsaconf it detected my soundcard and all that. I ended up getting it to work by recompiling the kernel and including only the driver for my sound card. I also compiled the driver built into the kernel, and not as a module.