If sound is not working.....try this!!!

[GeexBoxer]

If sound it not working for you or if sound wizard is not recognizing your sound card. try this

Open console/terminal and type modprobe snd-trident, press enter.

after that open sound wizard and select trident and sound should work.

I had a lot of trouble getting sound to work, fortunately I was able to find this method in the forums. I am posting it here so if somebody else is having sound problems maybe this will fix it for them.

[tempestuous]

Well, the underlying concept of pre-loading your ALSA kernel module before running alsaconf is certainly a good idea, particularly if Puppy has failed to automatically load this module at bootup ...
but the snd-trident module is compatible ONLY with Trident and SiS 7018 chipsets.

To know which ALSA module supports your audio card, see here -
http://www.alsa-project.org/main/index.php/Matrix:Main
If you have a Creative SoundBlaster Live, for example, you would pre-load the snd-emu10k1 module.

[d4ndy]

I've tried this with the mwave module, but it always fails to load ("Could not claim I/O region starting at 30"). This is on an ancient Thinkpad 765D I've been trying to resurrect with Puppy 2.14, the most recent version I've been able to install to the hard drive. Everything works fine, except for the MWave roadblock (sound and modem).

[tempestuous]

The "mwave" module does not support audio, only the MWave modem. And it only supports the MWave modem variant found in Thinkpad models 600/600E and 770/ED/X/Z.

The MWave audio chip is discussed on the ThinkWiki website -
http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Category:765D
http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/MWave_MDSP2780

Apparently it's necessary to initialise the MWave audio chip under Windows/DOS, so they suggest booting into DOS then using "loadlin" to boot from DOS to Linux. Then the sound can be used in Linux with SoundBlaster emulation. The ALSA ISA SoundBlaster modules are snd-sb8 and snd-sb16.

This sounds a bit complex, but it's certainly feasible. It just requires a FAT partition at the start of your hard drive where you would install DOS (or even Windows 95).

There is also a Thinkpad configuration tool for Linux called "tpctl" -
http://tpctl.sourceforge.net/tpctlhome.htm#description
which might (?) set up the audio device without booting into DOS. I'm not sure.

[d4ndy]

Yes, I've tried, insofar as I was able, to set up that situation from ThinkWiki with preloading the drivers in DOS and then going into linux, but so far I haven't been able to make it work. That was about a month and a half ago, since when I've set it aside to let Knowledge accumulate on the internet. I think I used grub4dos instead of loadlin, but I tried so many approaches in so many variations that I'm a bit hazy. Once I go back to it, I'll probably start from scratch again.
I didn't know the mwave module only applied to the modem. I hadn't tried to get that going (sound first!), but I'll probably still have a problem there since, as I said, the module wouldn't load to begin with, because, as you say, it's not for my model.
Thanks for the reply.
At this point, I'm wondering if I should be muddying up a howto with something that should be in a "problem" forum.

[tempestuous]

I just came across this thread again and saw your comment -

I think I used grub4dos instead of loadlin

There could be a critical difference between using grub4dos and loadlin. grub4dos loads a chosen operating system; it's an either/or situation.
But loadlin loads Linux from a running DOS or Windows operating system. Since your audio device would be up-and-running under DOS/Windows, this might be the necessary magic.

[Cyberponcho]

Thank you very much for this excelent post, within a minute i got my sound working, now my notebook is complete, thanks!!