I’ve written before about trying to get sound working on my ancient laptop. When Ubuntu Breezy (5.10) was released; I wiped my laptop and reloaded it from scratch. Unfortunately, this version of Ubuntu also failed to auto-detect/setup my laptop’s soundcard. After much googling and reading of the Ubuntu Forums, I finally got the sound working!
Below, I’ve summarized everything I read and tried in getting this working:
- Edit /boot/grub/menu.lst and add
acpi=off
to the end of the options for the kernel1.
- Install libsdl1.2debian-alsa via Synaptic.
- Removed
/etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base
.
- Created
/etc/modprobe.d/alsa
2.
- Added snd-cs4236 to the bottom of
/etc/modules
.
Mind you that summary leaves out dozens of pages of instructions, including the various diagnostics I ran to try figuring out what was wrong. Some of those diagnostics were:
lspci -v
— No help to me as my soundcard is connected via ISA and not PNP.
lspnp -v
— This would only detect my soundcard after I turned off acpi.
dmesg | grep -i "isa\|multi\|sound\|audio"
— This might give you more info about the soundcard, but didn’t help me.
pnpdump
— This might give you more info about the soundcard, but didn’t help me
Additionally, I ran across several recommendations for the options line in /etc/modprobe.d/alsa
but the version of the file listed in the footnotes is the only one which worked for me.
Lastly, if you have this laptop there is a considerable amount of good information still available on Dell’s website for it. For example, apparently there is a Windows/DOS utility for configuring the IRQs and whatnot that the soundcard uses. Fortunately, I didn’t have to try downloading it and finding some way to run it but the option is there if you need it.
1/boot/grub/menu.lst
title Ubuntu, kernel 2.6.12-9-386
root (hd0,0)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.12-9-386 root=/dev/hda1 ro quiet splash acpi=off
initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.12-9-386
savedefault
boot
2/etc/modprobe.d/alsa
alias char-major-116 snd
alias char-major-14 soundcore
alias snd-card-0 snd-cs4236
options snd-cs4236 port=0x530 cport=0x210 isapnp=0 dma1=1 dma2=0 irq=5
alias sound-slot-0 snd-card-0
alias sound-slot-1 snd-card-1
alias sound-service-0-0 snd-mixer-oss
alias sound-service-0-1 snd-seq-oss
alias sound-service-0-3 snd-pcm-oss
alias sound-service-0-8 snd-seq-oss
alias sound-service-0-12 snd-pcm-oss
alias /dev/mixer snd-mixer-oss
alias /dev/dsp snd-pcm-oss
alias /dev/midi snd-seq-oss
options snd cards_limit=1