Sound mayhem
 

I am now quite desperate...

I used to run slack 9 on my toshiba Satelitte 5000-104 which I installed 5 months ago.
I decided last week to get rid of my win partition to go 100% slack and in the process to upgrade to 9.1. So, formated the drive, etc and manage to install most of it apart from the sound! I have been compiling kernel and play with alsa drivers for 3 days and I don't know what to do anymore. Please help!

How i arrive there:

1. Install from cd everything including kernel source apart from kde and gnome (later with dropline)
2. Reboot in my new system.
3. patch the kernel with the latest acpi patch for 2.4.22.
4. Recompile kernel setting processor type to P III and tick all the ACPI support option. Nothing else touched, no sound option or anything!
5. make dep && make clean && make bzImage && make && make install && make modules && make modules_install (following forum howto...)
6. reboot my new system
7. install alsa-driver-0.9.7c: ./configure && make && make install
8. run alsaconf which detects and configure my card marked as "intel8x0"
9. install nvidia driver and my saved customised XFree86config file.
10. startx (blackbox)
11. try to play a sound

My problem: sounds is coming out but very sporadic and cut out (inintelligible). CPU usage rockets up to max and the computer becomes dead slow!!

I have done the whole stuff a few times now and really don't know what to do next. Slack 9.0 didn't pose me this problem and I am thinking downgrading to it if I don't find a way to sort it out...

Can someone help please? What can I do to sort that ou? Help very much appreciated!!!
Thanks

I gave up on Alsa. It, imho, is pretty crappy. Sure, it allowed multiconnects, but I found it
cutting out, flaky response, and system beeps would suspend xmms for about 30 seconds (even at nice --20). I just don't start it anymore, selected OSS as the xmms sound driver, and all apps EXCEPT wav playback in k3b (which only works with alsa) are fine. (xmms, Replay, Rezound, Audacity, CDs, noatun, etc).

RO

Unfortunaly, I need alsa RolledOat. My tosh won't work without it..

Hmmm, well, In Redhat, it helped a lot when I did try to run it to set the audio buffer size (response time) to highest. (Fast Response, fewer dropouts and high CPU usage). It was with a GUI that I changed this, but there must be an alsa config file. No idea where it is in Slack though.

RO

Thanks RolledOat!
Can someone advices on how to do that on slack please? Guys, I really need to sort that one out! Any help most welcome!
L

Pushing it back up. I really need help on that one... Any sound professionals?

Perhaps asking the sound experts at alsa or the mailing list?

http://www.alsa-project.org/mailing-lists.php3

Thanks MsMittens. I have just done it. Who knows, may be I will have an answer...

I got a lot of such entries on my /var/log/syslog
Oct 22 18:19:42 ns1 modprobe: modprobe: Can't locate module sound-slot-1
Oct 22 18:19:42 ns1 modprobe: modprobe: Can't locate module sound-service-1-0
Oct 22 18:19:43 ns1 modprobe: modprobe: Can't locate module sound-slot-1
Oct 22 18:19:43 ns1 modprobe: modprobe: Can't locate module sound-service-1-0

Any one knows wut those are. It looked like 9.1 sound has issue considering so many post with sound problem, I actually don't need that sound but I have 163 lines of those annoyed me for checking the syslog .. My SC is something with cmpci..

Answer for the full slack install performance decrease :
Full install install also all th daemons which also might started them on booting ..
So check in /etc/rc.d/rc.<script> , change the permission something like chmod 644 of rc.script-that u don't really want them to run ar boot time..
rc.{samba,bind,httpd,sendmail,ssh,..}. If they have 755 permission they ll be started at booting ..
Try also comment out pftp.. /etc/inetd .. if u dun really want to see some stranger IPs on ur /var/log/{secure,proftpd} connected/opened session on yer host ..

It is possible to modify /etc/initab to start less tty than 6 for saving some resource ..

Thanks for the tip linuxJaver about disabling services at start up to use less memory. I don't think this is the source of my problem as when no sound are played, my laptop idles happily at 99.5 % cpu free...

I am not sure about your issue but it looks like you have missing modules. Did you try to manually prob them to see what error is returned?

And yes, there is a sound issue in slack 9.1, obvious considering the amount of sound related posts we saw since the release.
I just wish a slackware top-notch user/developper/contributor could shed some light on those issues...

L

Actually, I'm like linuxJaver and I still get those even after fixing my sound issues. I have to agree with you, laurentbon, in that the main issue is sound right now, IMHO for slack 9.1. It's unfortunate. Just when I think I've found a solution, I see that it's a temporary workaround.

*sigh*

Ah well. If I see anything or hear anything... I will forward it to you.. thus far it's been pretty bleak on some stuff..

For info, I was adviced on the laptop forum to try the following:

try adding this to /etc/modules.conf or it's equivalent in Slack...
options sound dmabuf=1

Apart from the fact that I haven't got much idea about what it means, it doesn't work and doesn't change anything sound wise.

Not far from downgrading to slack 9.0 at this point... A shame...