[ltp] Finally there is joy with Debian Sarge/Sid, Kernel 2.6.9 and sound on my ThinkPad 600e!

[Michelle Klein-Hass]

w00t!!!!

It looks like everything, and I mean everything, is now working with my 
install of Debian. It's no longer strictly Debian Sarge, because a liberal 
seasoning of Sid has been thrown into the stewpot. Hey, a little @narchy 
never hurt anyone... ;-)

The Great Sound Mess was completely ironed out with the introduction of Kernel 
2.6.9. Hopefully there will be no evil security mess that requires moving off 
of this working kernel. The trick is, at least with my particular ThinkPad  
600e (2645-IB1), to NOT kick sound on during the bootup process or during the 
KDE startup process. Sound must be started AFTER everything else. This is 
what the 4Front Technologies guys figured out, and what I should have 
remembered through all the times we have been contending with this machine.

My friend Chad wrote a shell script to insmod the proper ALSA module after 
bootup...it must be run manually, as Root. We decided to call the script 
"soundon" after the OSS utility to turn sound on, because back when I had 
sound running with the 4Front proprietary driver I had to do the same thing. 

When I get behind my lappie and check my mail again I will send the soundon.sh 
script to individual users if anyone wants it.

I now can watch VCD 1.1 and VCD 2.0 files to my heart's content on the Linux 
side of things. Wait, didn't I say that I installed a Panasonic combo drive? 
What about DVDs? Well, they work...sorta. You have to tell mplayer to drop 
frames to maintain sync, and you absolutely, positively, cannot do a single 
blessed thing else while it's running. There is motion comp hardware 
assistance available in the NeoMagic video chipset if anyone can 
reverse-engineer how to get at it. NeoMagic hasn't released the specs on the 
video chipset, and who knows if they will? I intend to contact them on this 
matter...the ThinkPad 600e is still one of the best Linux laptops ever made, 
and they should know that lots of the still-useful machines are out there 
running Linux and have DVD drives that could use a boost for playback.

Anyway, this rocks. This is the best possible birthday present I could ever 
have...a completely functional 600e/400MHz running Linux. Happy happy joy 
joy!

Take care,
Michelle aka Ms. Geek
-- 
Michelle Klein-Hass
Box 2273, Van Nuys, CA 91404-2273
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