Sound on an ultra 10, kernel 2.4

[stormynorman]

Dear gentoo sparcers,

I asked this forum some time ago how to get sound working on my Ultra 10 running gnome. Since I did not get much useful info, I assume that nobody knows. There were two groups of people: they either said it was "running out-of-the-box" or they "never got it to work". Since I put a lot of time in and figured something out, I would like to share.
The reason for sound not working properly probably lies in gnome. I did not find a way to get it running...although the daemon was running, audioctl was configured correctly and "esdplay" could play .wav files from the commandline but gnome was somewhat unable to talk to the daemon..Maybe there is a way to make it work, but I (still a newbie) did not find it....
.... I switched to "xfce". And I have to say that this is a lot nicer anyway and all apps run MUCH faster, too. So if you want an Ultra 10 running linux nicely, stay away from gnome and for sound do the following:

Ultra 10:
-compile the driver cs4231 into the kernel (I did not compile it as module)
-emerge the windowmanager xfce
-emerge xmms
(I used the latest releases that were explicitly marked "stable on sparc" in the gentoo-portage-database on the web! by emerging them with the entire pathname "emerge /usr/portage..foo...")

From xfce you then simply start xmms from the menu bar

Configure xmms: check out
http://www.xmms.org/docs/readme.php

2 important things:
change the output-plugin from "oss" to "eSound" (right mouse botton click on xmms-window and then options/preferences/I-O-plugins)
Now you can use xmms to play files. And it will even be automatically recognized when you try to listen to an mp3 stream over the web (mozilla).
Using the Cd-rom as a cd player: configure input plugin "cd player": put the correct devices in the appropriate fields (likely /dev/cdrom and /mnt/cdrom) and configure output to "digital" (not "analog"); ALTHOUGH there is a botton "check device" which upon clicking will tell you that there is something wrong! it works!

I then used the option "play directory" and chose /mnt/cdrom. That plays audio cds!

Hoping that this will be useful for somebody

Cheers

Norman