Feeble sound on Presario 6024 with Alsa driver.

[eauclair]

I have super feeble sound on my Compaq Presario 6024. I have had sound working under both Redhat 7.3, and Slackware 8.1 on the same machine. This time, I'm using Gentoo 1.4 and am trying to use the "ALSA" drivers. I get no errors, but I have to turn the speakers alway the way up to hear feeble sounds from KDE 3.1. I have, of course, been playing with the mixers and "unmuting" - I think everything is set up properly. Or I must be close.

With Slackware 8.1, I had to add some modules to my /etc/rc.d/rc.local script (which seems like an 'autoexec.bat') I had to add "insmod ac97_codec" and "insmod i810_audio" to the rc.local file. In my /etc/rc.d/rc.modules I had to enable the modprobes of "usb-uhic" and "audio".

With Gentoo, I have recompiled my kernel (several times), I turned off all the sound support except for "Sound Support" (per the Alsa doc), I also turned on USB-Audio. After each kernel compile, I have re-done an "emerge alsa-driver", per the docs.

I know this sounds like a mixer problem, but I ran several of the mixers, and the volume is at 100%.

The driver I am using is "intel8x0". I hope that is the right one, since I don't know how to remove them(!).

When I run "update-modules", I now get an error that ends with (I think) "...drm/isis.3" Or something like at. It is some kind of kernel error about undefined symbols. I can post the exact message later. I found many occurences of that error in Google.


Under slackware, this is what the probe programs revealed:

lspci shows a:
"00:1f.5 Multimedia audio controller: Intel Corp. 82801BA/BAM AC'97 Audio
(rev 05)"


dmesg | less shows a:
"usb.c: registered new driver audio"
"audio.c: v1.0.0:USB Audio Class Driver"

pnpdump shows:
"#no boards found"

cat /proc/dma shows:
4:cascade

cat /proc/interrupts shows:
"10: XT-PIC usb-uhci"
"11: XT-PIC usb-uhci"

cat /proc/interrupts shows:
2000-20ff : Intel Corp. 82820 820 (Camino 2) Chipset AC'97 Audio
Controller"
2400-24ff : Intel Corp. 82820 820 (Camino 2) Chipset AC'97 Audio
Controller"

Any suggestions??

TIA!

[Ian Goldby]

The Intel8x0 driver is the correct one for the Intel AC'97 Audio controller, which you say you have. (To change driver, change the ALSA_CARDS environment variable and emerge alsa-driver. It's best to put ALSA_CARDS="intel8x0" in your /etc/make.conf.)

You don't need USB-Audio for ALSA sound. That's only for playing audio over speakers that plug into the USB port instead of the usual 2.5mm audio out stereo jack.

If you hear any sound at all, then you've probably got the right drivers loaded and working. Which brings us back to the mixer:

I have the i810 chipset too, and I found that the KDE mixer didn't display all of the correct mixer channels. Some of the names are non-obvious. For example, the main output is the Headphones channel, and the Master channels do nothing.

If you haven't tried alsamixer yet (from the command line), I'd recommend it as it seems to do a much better job than KDE of displaying every channel. So try that, turn every channel up to maximum (well - be careful if you do that!), and then work backwards and see which channels have no effect when you turn them off again.

[eauclair]

I got my sound working. You were right, I needed to turn on and turn up my alsa Headphone channel. I needed to unmute the Headphone channel.

I fixed it by doing an "amixer set Headphone 100 unmute".

They might want to mention that in the ALSA instructions!

Thanks for the help!