Greetings: Thank you to all who replied to my original mail. Paul, I've had no trouble with the laptop (an HP Omnibook 4150) audio chipset under ALSA, as long as I load the CS4232 module instead of the one for the NM256. Takashi pointed out that the NeoMagic set is essentially the CS chipset under another name, and indeed the CS4232 module works flawlessly. OTOH, all attempts failed with the NM256 module for ALSA, OSS/Free, and OSS/Linux. In the case of OSS/Linux I was advised to try the NM2000 instead, and that module also worked. So basically the NM256 is crap, and when it's identified by one of the live distros everything stops. Is there any way around it ? Best, dp Paul Winkler wrote: >On Tue, Apr 27, 2004 at 11:33:03AM -0400, Dave Phillips wrote: > > >>Greetings: >> >> Last night I tried running the latest Dynebolic and AGNULA live discs >>from my laptop and from Ivy's desktop machine. Both failed due to >>different reasons. The desktop machine's CD-ROM drive is old, and I kept >>getting looped in a 'bad read' error. The laptop is not so stable these >>days, but both distros failed at the same point: they recognize the A/V >>chipset (a NeoMagic NM256 piece o' crap) and stall there. I'll have the >>laptop with me in Karlsruhe, maybe one of the gurus can help me with it >>then ? >> >> > >I have the cursed Neomagic 256 AV in my old Dell CPI-A. >I found that with Alsa, the system had a roughly 60% chance >of total lockup when loading the driver. > >I had some back-and-forth email with Takashi which resulted >in some patches that made the driver less likely to freeze the >system, and at one point it was down to maybe a 10% chance of lockup. >But later releases of ALSA made it much worse again. >Eventually I gave up... I don't run audio on that laptop anymore :-( > >On the random occasions that it managed to load, the driver worked fine :-\ > > >
