-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 pre-script - for those that don't like long, detailed explanations of things, move on, there's nothing of interest to you here. ;-)
Ok, maybe this would be better described as a how-not-to, because I messed up a few things while trying to get sound working on this laptop, and what follows is a description of how I got my head out of my rear and got it working. Hopefully this will be of use to somebody, someday. Further to my pre-script, I'm not posing any questions here. It works, and I'm describing the process in case any part of it might be of use to someone else. Critiques of my technique are welcome though (like how I fixed the permissions thing, way at the end). If you're still reading, go get a drink first. This goes on for a while. The laptop: Toshiba 335CDS Pentium 266 MMX 96 MB RAM 4 GB hard drive C&T 65555 video card Yamaha OPL3-SA3 sound card The distro: Debian 3.0, fresh base install, with X and the newly released KDE 3.1 packages installed (that's the configuration this time - this machine has also run RedHat 7.3 and 8.0, and Mandrake 9.0 at other times in the past) The problem: Sound was not working. Upon logging in to KDE I was greeted with a dialog box with the following message: "Sound server informational message. Error while initializing the sound driver: device /dev/dsp can't be opened (Permission denied) The sound server will continue, using the null output device" Since I have run other distros on this machine in the past, and had sound work then, I knew that I had messed up. This error dialog twigged my memory and reminded me that I needed to run sndconfig to get the OPL3 card set up properly. As Jarrod pointed out in another email, the settings for the sound card (DMA's, io ports, the sorts of things sndconfig wants to know) can be found in the BIOS, which is accessed by holding down the ESC key while powering on or rebooting, then pressing F1 when it tells you to. I ran sndconfig and set the settings to match what was set in the BIOS. Here's where I went wrong for the first time. It threw an error message as it was loading the modules, but it played the sample sound just fine. I thought the error message would present a problem even though it played the sample sound. Here is the output that I saw after the sndconfig program exited: opl3sa2: No PnP cards found opl3sa2: Search for cards at 0x880 opl3sa2: Found OPL3-SA3 (YMF715E or YMF719E) opl3sa2: Control I/O port 0x370 not free opl3sa2: There was a problem probing one of the ISA PNP cards, continuing opl3sa2: Control I/O port 0x370 not free opl3sa2: There was a problem probing one of the ISA PNP cards, continuing opl3sa2: Control I/O port 0x370 not free opl3sa2: There was a problem probing one of the ISA PNP cards, continuing YM3812 and OPL-3 driver Copyright (C) by Hannu Savolainen, Rob Hooft 1993-1996 My mistake was believing the errors. The "control port not free" messages looked all scary to me, when in fact everything works fine despite them. My second mistake after that was to bring the laptop to the installfest this past weekend and try to configure it there. Why was that a mistake? Because the default mixer settings for the card are very, very low. As I played with the settings, I kept trying to test it to hear sndconfig play the sample sound. In the end though, there was so much noise in the background with people installfesting all around me that I couldn't hear it, even when it was working properly. My next mistake was not reading the KDE error message again. When I got home to a quieter environment I tried again, and heard the sample sound. Figuring I must have it set up right and deciding the "not free" messages were bogus (I don't remember ever seeing them before under other distros, but anyway...), I logged in to KDE again, only to be greeted by the same arts error message dialog as seen earlier. At this point, the card was in fact set up right, and the most important part of that message is the part in brackets, "(Permission denied)". I tried uninstalling/reinstalling of parts of KDE related to sound and multimedia (arts and such). This was not the problem and wasted a lot of my time. :-) Once I finally decided to pay attention to that big screaming statement about permissions, I checked the ownership on /dev/dsp, and found them to be "root.audio". I checked my Mandrake machine, and found ownership on the equivalent file to be "ian.audio" (and I am sure that I never manually gave myself ownership of that device on the Mandrake box). So, in this case, the message was telling the truth. I did not, in fact, have permission to access the device. Some googling turned up the answer (for Mandrake) that the /etc/security/console.perms file (part of PAM) controls this behaviour of assigning proper ownership. This file doesn't exists on the laptop (at least, not as part of the base Debian PAM package, and I'm no master of dpkg/apt yet, so I don't know how to find it and get it installed - I'm still reading the man pages on those two apps to find a urpmf equivalent). My solution was instead to add my user "ian" to the audio group using vigr (which is really basic Unix permission stuff - I'm sad to say it took me far too long to figure that one out, but I'm admitting it here to prevent anyone else spending too much time on such a little thing). Once I had added myself to the audio group, I logged back in to KDE and got the happy login jingle, and was able to play an MP3 without any problem (and loaded up KMix to set the mixer levels to more reasonable settings too). And there you have it. Like I said, I hope this helps somebody, someday. Useful links: http://www.linux-on-laptops.com/ http://www.linux-on-laptops.com/toshiba.html (for Toshiba models specifically) http://www.michaelminn.com/linux/notebooks/toshiba335.html (for this model, the 335CDS, that I am working with.) -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.0.7 (GNU/Linux) iD8DBQE+SbiGSiY+RXI7JS4RAnuZAJ90IW9pPYd5lS6xl0xatABkJPqqeACfX6+/ FGmh36m8ZVjx3XfSdnL7E6c= =9dpX -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
