[Sound] PNP sound cards on dual boot systems

[Ken Seymour <kenaseymour@xxxxxxxxx>]

The experts can correct me if I am wrong on this.

I have seen a few posts of people having problems with
PNP sound cards on dual boot systems.
Usually the reported problem is that the sound card
works under Windows but not under Linux.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I had this problem
and eventually fixed it.

On a single boot Linux system, I believe you can tell
the BIOS to configure the PNP card addresses
automatically using 'PNP Operating System = FALSE' or
something like that.

But for a dual boot system with Windows on it, you
usually have 'PNP Operating System = TRUE'.
This allows the windows code to probe the PNP cards
and send the commands to them to fix their IO
addresses.

For Linux, I think you have to explicitly tell isapnp
what addresses to use via /etc/isapnp.conf.

The process I used was to run:

   pnpdump > /etc/isapnp.conf

and then to manually edit this file to select only one
of all possible configurations for each card.

This is covered briefly at
http://linux-sxs.org/pnpdump.html.

The messages people see where their PNP card is
detected is just the first step of the process.
It does not cause the card to appear at the IO
addresses where the driver module is looking.

I did not try just setting the BIOS 'PNP Operating
System = FALSE' because I was not sure what windows
would do in this circumstance and 
the system was borrowed.
I did not want to mess up the owner's Windows system
in the process.



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