

Re: Trying to get sound working ...

Ivan Uemlianin wrote:

Dear All

I'm running Debian Woody on an IBM Thinkpad A31p.  Everything is working
fine, except sound.


The sound card is an Intel Corp. 82801CA/CAM AC'97 Audio (Analog Devices


Installing Debian, I made sure the following sound driver modules were


I gave no parameters as I wasn't aware of the need for any at the time.

Having installed Debian sound was just not working.  For example, cdcd
would happily play my CDs - silently.  (At the moment only root has
access to certain devices - e.g. audio, write access to hda1 - but
that's a separate issue.)

- sndconfig correctly identifies the sound card but can't config it.

- lsmod includes four of the modules, but not i810_audio:

Module                  Size  Used by    Not tainted
mpu401                 18784   0  (unused)
sound                  52876   0  [mpu401]
ac97_codec              9568   0
soundcore               3236   2  [sound]

- /etc/modules does not include ac97_codec, sound or soundcore, but does
include i810_audio and mpu401

What happens when you try "modprobe i810_audio"?

- The following is from dmesg (boot messages), which seems to imply that
something is going wrong:

Something I read on the Linux Kernel Mailing List (lkml) the other day indicated that at least one of the errors below is meaningless. Basically, the chip has support for 6 channels, but the vendor (IBM) chose to support only 2 of those, thus the message about "unable to map surround DAC's).

Intel 810 + AC97 Audio, version 0.21, 10:28:09 Apr 14 2002
PCI: Found IRQ 11 for device 00:1f.5
PCI: Sharing IRQ 11 with 00:1f.3
PCI: Sharing IRQ 11 with 00:1f.6
PCI: Sharing IRQ 11 with 02:00.1
i810: Intel ICH3 found at IO 0x18c0 and 0x1c00, IRQ 11
i810_audio: Audio Controller supports 6 channels.
ac97_codec: AC97 Audio codec, id: 0x4144:0x5348 (Analog Devices AD1881A)
i810_audio: AC'97 codec 0 Unable to map surround DAC's (or DAC's not
present), total channels = 2
ac97_codec: AC97 Modem codec, id: 0x5349:0x4c27 (Unknown)
i810_audio: timed out waiting for codec 1 analog ready.

- Is it an IO/IRQ problem, and if so

Probably not; PCI devices (of which your sound card is one) generally get set up properly without any human intervention.

  - what other info do I need (e.g. dma, mpu) and how do I get it?
  - how do I add module parameters?
- If not:
- what else might it be?

Again, try "modprobe i810_audio".

  - where do I need to look? (I'd rather avoid alsa/kernel stuff until
I've exhausted this track)

Best wishes



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