Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

[daoist]

Hi, I just discovered Puppy Linux and I must say, it's awesome! My only problem with it is that on the admittedly confusing to Linux 600e soundcard. When Puppy comes up, it guesses the wrong soundcard. With some messing around with rmmod and alsawizard, I can eventually get the sound going. I'd like to make this permanent, but Puppy always re-guesses the soundcard wrong when I reboot. Can anyone help me make my Puppy remember the right soundcard?

[stagediver]

Hi daoist !

I hope i can help you a little bit, but i am not a linux expert.

I also have a nice old thinkpad 600e which i got from a ebay auction 2 weeks ago. And the decision was clear: I don't want crapware from Redmond on this
jewel !

Okay, there were two different versions of Thinkpad 600e released by IBM those days according to http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Problem_with_broken_sound_on_some_ThinkPads

You can read there:
"There are two sound chips in these machines, a PCI based Crystal SoundFusion 4610, and an ISA based Crystal SoundFusion 4239.

The Linux drivers for the CS4610 (both OSS and ALSA) expect to find it paired with an AC'97 codec chip, while instead the CS4610 is paired with the ISA CS4239. This was done, because at the time this allowed DOS games to output sound using SoundBlaster Pro emulation.

To get sound under Linux you will have to use the OSS cs4232 or ALSA snd-cs4236 driver for the ISA soundchip instead. "

After installing Puppy to hd i used "Menu->Setup->Alsa sound Wizard" to detect the damn sound chip.

It said "...on this notebook, CS4236 driver should be used, although CS46xx chip is detected. Shall i try to snd-cs4236 driver and probe the legacy ISA configuration ?"

I choose Yes and it was working after "alsaconf" aka "Alsa sound Wizard" was finished, i only had to set

- the master volume
- pcm volume
- output gain

with Puppy volume mixer (Start->Multimedia->Puppy sound mixer)

Remember the above link, there a two different sound chips built into this machines those days, i don't know what "Alsa sound Wizard" tells you,
try a different setup if this don't work.

I thought i solved the problem, but i found out after a reboot the soundcard was still recognized, but all volume levels from the master volume, pcm volume and output gain were set back to zero, so i had to set the back manually again with Puppy volume mixer.
Next reboot, the same problem again !

At this point it was clear to me, that the volume state was not correctly saved (whereever this should be saved, i have no clue).

So i looked in this forum for some posts of "Puppy volume mixer"
and found a post from the author of it, Raul Suarez here:
http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=15640
where he introduces some kinda new version of "Puppy volume mixer"
(i think) and he mentioned that "Puppy volume mixer" depends on
"setvol" which is a command line tool to setup volume levels for your soundcard. It is already included in Puppy Linux, give it a try in the commandline.

I tried this in a console, worked fine. But i knew these settings would be again lost after shutdown or reboot. So i saved the various commands
into /etc/rc.d/rc.local (probably not the "fine english way")
and now sound was there after a reboot / shutdown.

I put this in rc.local :
setvol 0 95
setvol 3 89
setvol 4 89
setvol 13 89


But i have a strange problem, after some five minutes or so, every volume levels i changed are set back to zero !

WHY ??

Can anybody here shed some light on this strange behaviour ?

[Chronos]