5.5 Sound

It should be noted that Linux 2.4.17 recognized the sound card fine, but caused problems. In Linux 2.4.18, these problems went away and the sound is working fine, though there are some known problems (this is fixable though, but will require some additional kernel configuration - more about this later).

First, let's load in the correct module for the sound card. If compiling the kernel yourself, choose to compile the sound card driver as a module, by selecting Intel ICH (i8xx) audio support, as well as saying Yes for the Sound card support.

If you chose not to custom compile your kernel, your Linux distribution should pick up the card fine. If not, the driver can probably be loaded in. In either method, you should probably add these lines to your /etc/modules.conf file (Note: Some users report this is automatically done in Redhat Linux):

alias sound-slot-0 i810_audio
alias sound-slot-0-0 i810_audio
alias char-major-14 i810_audio

For Debian users, you should not edit /etc/modules.conf directly. Instead create the file /etc/modutils/sound with the lines from above and run update-modules.

Whichever method you followed, you can activate the drivers with:

# /sbin/insmod ac97_codec
# /sbin/insmod i810_audio

The problem mentioned above is as follows: when I use mpg123 to play any mp3 file, the sound skips, or pauses. xmms and xine worked fine though.

I noticed that when testing the sound with mpg123 (or other applications such as plaympeg), it would work fine only when I moved the mouse around. At first, I presumed mpg123 did not work with the kernel driver because of the speed the sound was played back on, but then I figured it was an IRQ problem (the mouse conflicting with the soundcard). This was confirmed when I viewed my /proc/interrupts and saw everything was sharing IRQ 9.

The way to fix this is to compile the kernel with the latest ACPI kernel patches. This is discussed later in this document. The sound will then work under all applications perfectly.

Another alternative is to use the drivers from the Alsa Project. I did not explore this option, as I was content with the Linux 2.4.18 driver.

Berant Lemmenes reports that ALSA drivers worked correctly with the ALSA drivers 0.9.0rc1. After installing the drivers, he added the following to /etc/modules.conf.

# Native ALSA
alias char-major-116 snd
alias snd-card-0 snd-Intel8x0

# OSS Setup
alias char-major-14 soundcore
alias sound-slot-0 snd-card-0
alias sound-service-0-0 snd-mixer-oss
alias sound-service-0-1 snd-seq-oss
alias sound-service-0-3 snd-pcm-oss
alias sound-service-0-8 snd-seq-oss
alias sound-service-0-12 snd-pcm-oss