I have spent this weekend attempting to get ALSA running on a Dell Dimension that uses the CS4236+ sound driver. Surprisingly enough, the hardware appears to be working in that PNP finds the sound card. I built the 2.6.5 kernel with modularized support for ALSA and OSS compatibility under ALSA. When I got to the make modules_install stage, I got a torrent of error messages from depmod and a link to the document post-halloween-2.6.txt. that and a trip through the kernel documentation got me to install module-init-tools-3.0 which appears to be the newest version. That, when run, got all the dependency problems taken care of and I see no errors at all now when installing modules. It looks for all the world like it could work, but it doesn't. Another trip through the ALSA section of the 2.6.5 kernel tells me to use MAKEDEV.snd in the scripts directory. I did that and it successfully re-made all the audio devices as symlinks to similar names appended by a number. /dev/dsp or /dev/mixer got linked to /dev/dsp0 and /dev/mixer0. Makes perfect sense to me. I thought, "Now it will surely work!" Nope. Here is what I can tell so far. Nothing complains upon boot. I do have alsa-base installed as a Debian package and it did install without problem. One trouble-shooting suggestion I read said to look in /proc/asound/oss/sndstat to see a list of the cards. There is no such list so that is significant, but I am not sure what causes that. I play around a lot with /dev/dsp to record low-fidelity audio and even wrote an application in C that simulates a voice-activated recorder to catch amateur radio and police scanner traffic. You can normally just cat /dev/dsp >some_file and it will dump 8,000 8-bit samples per second of PCM audio to your file. It at least used to work under the 2.4.19 kernel I ran for a couple of years so I know the sound card can work fine if it sees the right setup. Now, if I try to do anything with the audio devices, the complaint is "no such device." The only complaint I see from the system except for when I try to use sound occurs on shutdown. Broadcast message from root (ttyS1) (Sun Apr 11 07:54:31 2004): The system is going down for reboot NOW! INIT: INIT: Sending processes the TERM signal ALSA detected, but alsactl not usable, carrying on with aumix. Saving mixer settings: failed. ALSA driver isn't running. To be a little more clear, if I look for /proc/asound/oss/sndstat, there is no asound directory under /proc although there are several other directories. ALSA just isn't getting that far yet. Thanks for any constructive ideas. I did a check of the archives, but didn't see anything that sounded exactly like this problem although that could just be that I picked the wrong search terms. to connect the dots, I Martin McCormick WB5AGZ Stillwater, OK OSU Information Technology Division Network Operations Group
