[ltp] ALSA Sound IBM Thinkpad X23

[Todd V. Rovito]

Todd V. Rovito wrote:

> Greetings,
>    I have a problem loading the ALSA drivers on a IBM Thinkpad X23 
> Laptop.
> After reading several Laptop Howto's I am convinced that the driver to 
> use is
> snd-intel8x0 and I have confirmed that with "lspci -v".  When I 
> attempt to load
> the drivers I get the following errors:
>    "ALSA ../../alsa-kernel/pci/ac97/ac97_codec.c:1860: AC'97 0 does 
> not respond
>    - RESET"
>    "insmod: /lib/modules/2.4.25/kernel/sound/pci/snd-intel8x0.o: 
> init_module:
>    No such device"
>    "insmod: /lib/modules/2.4.26/kernel/sound/pci/snd-intel8x0.o: Hint: 
> insmod errors
>    can be caused by incorrect module parameters, including invalid IO 
> or IRQ
>    parameters.  You may find more information in syslog or the output 
> from
>    dmesg"
>    "insmod: /lib/modules/2.4.26/kernel/sound/pci/snd-intel8x0.o: 
> insmod snd-card-0
>    failed"
>
> The commands to load the drivers are listed below.
>
> You can find the exact error message from syslog in the snippet 
> below.  I am
> not using the ALSA packages from Slackware (I did and I got the same
> error so I compiled everything by following the directions at the
> alsa-project.org website).  After some time working with ALSA I 
> attempted to
> use the Linux Kernel Sound Drivers so I compiled the following modules:
>    soundcore.o
>    sound.o
>    i810_audio.o
>    ac97_codec.o
>
> These drivers load correctly but XMMS plays songs in slow motion that 
> sound
> like a record player set to the wrong speed. 
> Here is the strange part if I follow these steps
> 1) load the Linux Kernel Sound Drivers (soundcore.o sound.o 
> i810_audio.o and ac97_codec.o NOT ALSA drivers)
>
> 2) Remove drivers (i810_audio.o ac97_codec.o), this leaves soundcore.o 
> and sound.o drivers in the kernel
>
> 3) Then load the ALSA drivers with the commands listed below
>
> At this point the ALSA drivers load and everything is working.  My 
> hypothesis
> is that by loading the Linux Kernel Drivers something in the hardware 
> gets
> initiated that ALSA is not doing.  Does anybody have a solution for the
> problem?  I really don't want to load, unload, then load ALSA again to 
> get it
> to work, seems like a flaky solution.
>
> Thanks for the help!

I upgraded my kernel to 2.6.7 and now the sound works great!  Still used 
the ALSA snd_i8x0 driver.  As an added plus the system "feels" much more 
responsive as far as the desktop applications.  I would recommend an 
upgrade to 2.6.x.