It works!

[cat]

Hello to everyone and thank you all for the tips, hints, howtos and information in this forum (not to forget this great looking distribution).
I've been trying to get Puppy running on my Laptop since Saturday, and the configuration of soundcard (ESS 1869 afaik) and ADSL connection almost drove me mad. Only slightly harder than for Damn Small Linux, though...
However, I have it working now, thanks to numerous posts and several hours of trial and error.

Would you think compiling a brief HOWTO for this specific machine would be useful? Just to sum up some of the tricks and "workarounds" I found out about.

Thank you, thank you, thank you!

[Brandon]

How did you get sound working? I have an Armada and am having a few problems with sound.

[MU]

Welcome to the kennels, cat
Congratulations for solving those issues where the wizards and autodetection had no success.

Would you think compiling a brief HOWTO for this specific machine would be useful? Just to sum up some of the tricks and "workarounds" I found out about.

Sure.
Such tweaks also may be helpfull for users of others machine, e.g. if they have to set up their soundcard manually.

Thanks, Mark

[Lobster]

put it on the wiki if possible . . .

http://puppylinux.org/wikka/UsingThisWiki

[cat]

Thanks for the welcome! I'll have a look at the wiki-creation some time. There really is a rather steep learning curve (I've only been using Linux for about half a year, mainly to get this old 'tanktop' going again)

@ Brandon:
Sound was indeed very troublesome. Ultimately, I got it to work like this:

On the bootup screen I used the bootcode 'puppy pnpbios=off', cause ALSA obviously had some trouble with this (it said something like that in the 'dmesg' I looked in when it didn't work)

After bootup I set up the soundcard manually using modprobe in the console. After fiddling around with the parameters, my final setup looks like this:
'modprobe snd_es18xx isapnp=0 port=0x220 mpu_port=0x330 dma1=1 dma2=1 irq=5 fm_port=0x388'

Sound plays rather well, I can't use puppy sound mixer though (yet?), but alsamixer works OK and since I have buttons for volume on my laptop I don't much care.

Hope this helps. Don't despair if it doesn't, there's bound to be some way to get it working.

Just as a side comment, on my Damn Small Linux install I used 'modprobe sb' with similar settings, works just as well.
Puppy's cuter, though.

[cat]

Did I move this topic here? If so, how did I do it? If not, who did it, and why?

[cat]

Well, after saving my configuration to HD I discovered that I still have to disable pnpbios and manually load the ethernetcard and soundcarddriver on every startup, so it's not yet quite the way I want it. So I guess its research and try-and-error again
But the look and feel of the OS overall are great, and if the annoying configuration issues with the legacy soundcards and some net setup configuration can be overcome in future releases I think the chance of converting people fed up with the Gates-Empire are really good.
I'll post something if I get it to work...

[cat]

All right!
I'm now running a frugal install as a parallel to my frugal Damn Small Linux. I added the

Code: Select all

puppy pnpbios=off

to the grub entry and the modprobe commands to /etc/rc.d/rc.local et voila - Sound works, pppoe-start works, now I only need to tweak my display to display 1024 instead of 800 resolution like it did with win98 and I have a blazingly fast, free and versatile substitute for Microsoft that hopefully can do everything I want it to do.

If I now become involved with Linux continuously, Puppy is the thing to blame!