Sound cs4232
 

Hey all. I'm running a fairly old, but still capable ibm thinkpad 380xd. I was running redhat 7.2 just fine, but of course the x windows system was pretty bogged down. I'm not sure if that was because redhat is fairly bloated or what not, but anyways I decided to try slackware, and I figured I could choose the lowmem kernel and that may help me speed things up a bit.

Anways, here are my specs, IBM thinkpad 380xd, running cs4237 sound, 233 mhz, 96 mb ram, 20 gig hard drive (that I upgraded because the standard 700mb didn't quite cut it).

Anyways here my problem. When I was running redhat, to get sound to work, I simply loaded the modules. when I ran pnpdump (I think that's right, the program that goes along side isapnp) it would find no board. So I simply made a file called sound up that called this

modprobe sound
insmod ad1848
insmod uart401
insmod cs4232 io=0x530 irq=5 dma=0 dma2=0

when I ran this after the insmod ad1848 an error would display on screen saying no pnp devices found using default.

After this sound would work perfectly. When I installed slackware I figured I could do the same thing

I made sure to install isapnptools.
when I tried executing the above, after the insmod ad1848 I recieved an error about module dependencies isapnp_device

**edit: I just checked Redhat 7.2 doesn't even have isapnp installed, so I tried reinstalling slackware without the isapnptools and still recieved module dependencies isapnp_device ... installing Redhat with pnpdump returns no board found when I execute that command also, so maybe my card is non-plug-and-play or something**

What Exactly can I do to try to alliviate this problem?

Also since I'm posting, do you think slackware 9.0 (I'm going to use 9.0 over 9.1 because my wireless drivers are uncompatible with the 2.4.22 kernel, hopefully they fix that soon), with the fce desktop. Running MozillaFirebird. I just have to figure out what program to use to check my email, I need something that is capable of SSL connection on both incoming and outgoing messages. So far the only program I've used that is compatible is Kmail, but that is for KDE, right? Or could I get that to work in fce? Anyways does this sound okay? Or am I still going to be bogging down on this system?

Thanks

Back in the days :} I had a 770ED with a cs4232,
too, and I remember that it was a bit tedious to
get the noise working ... the cards in the Thinkpads
are indeed NOT PnP ... if you have a DOS partition
make sure you have set the machine to the same
values that you use in Linux with the PS2.EXE
utility. (Try to get a DOS bootdisk if you don't).

Then, try something like
in modules.conf

Sorry that I can't be more specific, my old TP
passed away over 1.5 years ago.


Cheers,
Tink

cs4232
 

January 7, 2004

Hi Tunarle,

What you describe sounds similar enough to what I faced that I'll venture a reply here. I have been running Slack 8.1/kernel 2.4.20 on a 5 yr old TP 600. I eventually solved the sound problem via ALSA (not part of my original installation). Being new to Linux, my learning curve on all this was pretty steep. I pieced together the proper approach for my (and many other older?) Thinkpad from 2 sources:

-- http://www.alsa-project.org/~valentyn/
-- http://alsa.opensrc.org/index.php?page=ThinkPad600

Valentijn Sessink's How-to is really an excellent, thorough document. It is dated, however (late 1999), so one needs to fill in with newer information at places.

A couple of the keys I might point to from these sources:
1) the ALSA drivers must be configured ./configure --with-isapnp=no (I also did it with --with-sequencer=yes but I don't know how crucial that was... the isapnp option is crucial)

2) for my system (KDE 3.0 was the last one working), Valentijn's section 5.5 "Backwards compatibility" was crucial: the module 'snd-pcm1-oss' has to be inserted as well as the proper ALSA driver for the Crystal Semiconductor (snd-cs4236 in my case... snd-cs4232 for you, I should think)... Somehow I figured that out from messages or options that KDE was giving me... it only knew about OSS sound, and that module somehow makes the connection between OSS and the ALSA drivers.

3) It sounds as though you already have the needed port, control port, dma, irq, etc. etc. information... I got mine from two other systems, OS/2 Warp4 and Win98, that are bootable on the same machine. If you can't get that system information that way, you'll need the PS2.exe utility others have mentioned.

Note that successfully inserting the two modules will leave you with everything muted and levels as 0 -- I put the needed commands to unmute and set levels (e.g. /usr/bin/amixer set "Master Digital" 70 unmute) in the rc.modules file, after the insertion... maybe not accepted practice, but it works.

I hope this helps in some way.
Cheers,
--Mel