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Sound on a VPR Matrix 185A5
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carambola5
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Joined: 10 Jul 2002
Posts: 214

PostPosted: Wed Mar 05, 2003 4:50 pm    Post subject: Sound on a VPR Matrix 185A5 Reply with quote

OK, I know it isn't a very popular laptop, but bear with me. I've spent about 10 hours and many kernel compillations trying to get this right. My hope is that someone out there buys this machine, searches for help on it, and finds this page. God knows I could have used this info a couple of days ago.

The Kernel
I used the 2.5.63 kernel for full support of the Firewire and USB 2.0 that came with the machine. Turns out, this was not such a good move with Gentoo. I'll get into this later.

On to compiling the kernel:
First off, forget about all the hype about ALSA. It don't work. I tried it. Trust me.

You are going to need the OSS drivers. Period. So...
Code:
cd /usr/src/linux
cp .config ~/kernel.config
make mrproper
mv ~/kernel.config ./.config
make menuconfig

You should compile everything you do as modules. Don't know which module to use for the 185A5? Don't bother calling customer support. They told me it was a SoundBlaster Live! (might be true for the 200A5). 8 hours into figuring this out, a simple 'lspci' told me otherwise. The 185A5 has the ALi M5451 chipset! *shudder* Going to their website revealed that ALi is actually Acer Labratories Inc. I hate Acer. Never seen a good component come from them. But I digress.

The ALi driver is actually called trident. It will be found grouped with a few other chipsets, so don't fret if you don't see "ALi M5451" right away. You'll see it eventually.

So, you've got it set up, right? Sound is a module, OSS (and not ALSA) is a module, and so is the "Trident" group of sound chips. Good.
Code:
make bzImage modules modules_install

By the way, I'm recompiling the kernel because I want to. You probably don't have to do the "make mrproper" or "make bzImage."

The Setup
You need to edit your /etc/modules.autoload:
Code:
root@vpr / #echo ali5451 >> /etc/modules.autoload
root@vpr / #echo snd-mixer-oss >> /etc/modules.autoload
root@vpr / #echo snd-pcm-oss >> /etc/modules.autoload


Done
That's it! No messy config files for ALSA, no adding a script to the boot runlevel. Crank up xmms!
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randallsquared
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Joined: 06 Jul 2002
Posts: 9

PostPosted: Wed Apr 30, 2003 4:01 pm    Post subject: Re: Sound on a VPR Matrix 185A5 Reply with quote

carambola5 wrote:

You need to edit your /etc/modules.autoload:
Code:
root@vpr / #echo ali5451 >> /etc/modules.autoload
root@vpr / #echo snd-mixer-oss >> /etc/modules.autoload
root@vpr / #echo snd-pcm-oss >> /etc/modules.autoload



If I understand correctly, this will be blown away on next boot. You should use the files in /etc/modules.d/ instead.
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MathFreak
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Joined: 07 Jul 2002
Posts: 217
Location: Bethlehem, PA

PostPosted: Wed Apr 30, 2003 4:16 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Actually, modules.autoload doesn't get blown away (at least, not on my system). If anything, it would be modules.conf, which gets generated by the files in /etc/modules.d/.
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randallsquared
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PostPosted: Wed Apr 30, 2003 8:25 pm    Post subject: Really? Reply with quote

Ah. My mistake. :)
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