Via8233 - Supported by kernel or not?

thorne · Apprentice Joined: 19 Sep 2002 Posts: 177

First, let me apologize if this topic has been covered already, but I could not seem to dig up any useful information in the forums. There seem to be a lot of threads mentioning this sound controller, but no definite howto for getting it up and running. Searches on google did not yield much other than howto's involving the alsa driver, which I'm trying to stay away from.

I recently swapped out my motherboard as the old one died. My new motherboard has an onboard sound card. A Via8233 (it's labeled as realtek in the manual, but I've found information that indicates otherwise.)

px · Guru Joined: 26 Sep 2002 Posts: 497 Location: Metz, France

I may have a solution, compile your kernel with all sounds driver as module. Then after the compilation, go to your /lib/modules/xxx/kernel/drivers/sounds and do:
for plop in *.o; do modprobe `basename $plop .o`; done;

after the sound should work. Be sure to remove every stuff related to alsa.

If you get sound, do a lsmod and then you can add these modules name in modules.autoload or recompile the kernel to make them builtin.
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Nous autres, mordus d'informatique, préférons par-dessus tout passer notre temps à bidouiller nos ordinateurs, plutôt que les utiliser pour faire quelque chose de productif. [Dave Barry]

thorne · Apprentice Joined: 19 Sep 2002 Posts: 177

Hey, that's quite an interesting idea!

I will give that a try later on tonight and see if any of the built in drivers work.
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reves · Posted: Sat Oct 26, 2002 1:06 am Post subject:

I believe the kernel module (from the 2.4.x sources not Alsa) via82cxxx_audio.o should support this card.
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Robert

thorne · Apprentice Joined: 19 Sep 2002 Posts: 177

reves · Posted: Sat Oct 26, 2002 3:35 pm Post subject:

Did you try loading this while ALSA was loaded?
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Robert

thorne · Apprentice Joined: 19 Sep 2002 Posts: 177

not that I know of. how can I make sure?

I don't have alsa-drivers, or alsa-utils installed. There are no references to alsa when the system is booting. No alsasound in /ect/modules.d/, or in /etc/modules.autoload, etc.

Just to be extra sure I'm not blind, grepping through dmesg output found no references to alsa.
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Stupid bug, you go squish now!
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thorne · Apprentice Joined: 19 Sep 2002 Posts: 177

tried adding all sound drivers as modules, as px suggested. A few (2, to be exact) loaded without error, but sound did not work anyway. I tried compiling them into the kernel too (seperately, of course,) but again, sound did not work.

Ah well. I guess I should just plop the sb pci128 back in the system and disable the onboard sound.
_________________
Stupid bug, you go squish now!
-Homer Simpson

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Mustard007 · Posted: Sun Oct 27, 2002 9:20 pm Post subject:

Be sure you don't have a Via8233 "A" ! The via8233A just work in ALSA. This card is a onboard.

Some distro like Redhat 9 and mandrake 8.2 detect the card as Via8233 but is not working.

thorne · Apprentice Joined: 19 Sep 2002 Posts: 177

I took another look on the board, and the chip is labeled as Via8233A ... so... is anyone working on a driver for this card? =)
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Stupid bug, you go squish now!
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nalin · Posted: Mon Oct 28, 2002 6:24 am Post subject:

I have via onboard and recently upgraded to soundblaster 5.1...Almost any package I installed required artsdsp and with a recent upgrade to kde 3.1 beta i found artsdsp broked (buggy software or buggy user is still an open debate...). In any case I love this card...

FINITE · Guru Joined: 10 May 2002 Posts: 449

Use alsa, it works great with the via8233 intergrated sound chip. Though it may be better to get an sblive whatever card and use kernel sound. One thing that I know is that using alsa with the via8233 intergrated sound chip full duplex does not work. Meaning you can only have one source of sound at a time going through the chip (that i know of anyways).

thorne · Apprentice Joined: 19 Sep 2002 Posts: 177

Hey Finite,

I had it working with ALSA, but I was getting really poor sound quality. For example, hitting the backspace key one too many times in a terminal window would yield:

POP - beep - POP

It was really annoying. For now, I'm just using a sound blaster PCI128 with on the onboard controller disabled.
_________________
Stupid bug, you go squish now!
-Homer Simpson

Registered linux user #287718

Mustard007 · Posted: Tue Oct 29, 2002 6:04 am Post subject:

In the future kernel 2.6 (already in 2.5 dev.), Alsa is now incorporated in the kernel. If you try Mandrake 9, Alsa is already merged in the kernel and your ViA8233A onboard card will be detected and will work without any other manipulations !

zenon · Apprentice Joined: 09 Oct 2002 Posts: 263

I'm using the ck sources with ALSA built-in they are fantastic, I love them!

The prob is this crappy VIA sound chipset "VT82C686 AC97" when running XMMS it'll play for a few songs then I get the POP - beep - POP of death and XMMS stops playing and freezes, I have to kill it and start it again. I also get the same thing when in the terminal, I thought it was maybe just beeping because I pressed backspace too many times.

Oddly ALSAplayer works fine (no crashing) and even sounds better (god only knows why) but its complete lack of ANY user interface or playlist editor makes me keep coming back to XMMS.

bravecobra · Posted: Sun Mar 02, 2003 7:20 am Post subject:

Don't worry thorne, you're not alone. I'm having the exact same problem here. No solution yet though.

zenon · Apprentice Joined: 09 Oct 2002 Posts: 263

which prob bravecobra?

Can't get it working or have the crack pop crash in XMMS?

If it's the former go get the ck sources (I find their latency MUCH improved over the gentoo sources too) and compile ALSA right into the kernel (no modules for me, I like to have my kernels self contained!) if the latter then ALSA player will work flawlessly AND sound better than XMMS... the only prob again is its complete lack of any playlist support.... are there any other audio players out there? I've only emerged the two, maybe another player will work better.

Oh yes ALSA player will play forever w/o prob, it's just XMMS that does the sir-crash-alot routine.. although if you just leave it XMMS will start playing again after a few seconds.

dol-sen · Posted: Sun Mar 02, 2003 8:23 pm Post subject:

I have a Gigabyte board/KT400 chipset. I have just installed a new kernel gs-sources-2.4.21_pre5 with all the via drivers compiled in (ide, agp, snd).
I am using gnome 2.2, sound seems to work some in mplayer, the sound events crashes/locks up the system on some sounds. I have disabled sound events & unmerged gnome-audio.

I am an audio newbie in linux and I am not sure if some problems are due to nvidia drivers, xfree-4.3.0, this new kernel, or my own misconfiguring. The latter is probably the major culprit.

Any help or advice as to sound setup is greatly apreciatted

Brian

bravecobra · Posted: Sun Mar 02, 2003 9:38 pm Post subject:

djk29a · n00b Joined: 30 Mar 2003 Posts: 11

I have a similar chip on my Epox 8KHA+, and I must say that it's absolutely THE worst sound I've ever heard come from a sound card. I tried the card in Windows too, so it's not a driver issue.

I'd advise against using this for anything more than speech and dings and pops. It seems thoroughly useless for music.

Elm0 · Apprentice Joined: 24 Nov 2002 Posts: 281 Location: UK

https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=47650

Basically, you need to be using alsa-driver version 0.9.0rc6, none of the versions after this work (nasty sound quality)

It seems there has been some work going on with via82xx driver (as detailed in that thread) so it should be fixed soon.