[ltp] Mandrake 8.2 vs. TP 600e

[Michael Hagemann]

Hi,


On Tue, 16 Jul 2002 07:50:16 +0700 Arnold Troeger wrote:

> Steven Crane wrote:
> > 
> [snip]
> > Install and run "sndconfig" and it apparently works fine, even played a CD, but let the
> > Mandrake Control Centre take a look at it and that's the last you'll hear from it this
> > session. Something is obviously still screwy but it seems to work just so long aas you
> > don't try to figure out how.
> 
> Mandrake Control Center seems to want to install the Alsa sound
> drivers.  I could not make those work either.  The OSS driver though
> works well.  Once you have the OSS driver loading properly, you can
> start the KDE sound server, and kmixer to unmute the sound.

I had similar problems and tried OSS as well as Alsa.  I finally sticked
with Alsa because it seems more clean over all.  For example it restores
mixer settings at startup and I can suspend and resume with song playing
in xmms.  I think the definitive source for this is still Thomas Hood's
page:

    http://panopticon.csustan.edu/thood/tp600lnx.htm#secsnd

I have 600e and I think it sports a cs4236 (don't have it here, so I
would have to look).  So if Mandrake has precompiled Alsa-Modules or you
are willing to compile them yourself you should give it a try.  Alsa
also has a OSS emulation, so you can keep your configuration basically
as it is.


> > A lot of software still seems unduly quiet, but without really knowing what it is
> > supposed to sound like it is hard to tell. CD works, KDE intro and environment sounds
> > seem to be okay, WAV playback from a DOS partition works. Not so much as a peep
> > out of any of the tested games yet (which seems strange).

As other people have pointed out, this might be a problem with the file
permission for the sound devices.  The cleanest solution is to put your
non-root yourself into the "audio" group and to make sure that all the
relevant devices are audio-group-read/writeable.  For OSS those should
be /dev/mixer* and /dev/dsp*.


hth,
Michael

----- The Linux ThinkPad mailing list -----
The linux-thinkpad mailing list home page is at:
http://www.bm-soft.com/~bm/tp_mailing.html