On Tuesday night, I installed Mandrake 5.3 on my machine, and I was
pleasantly surprised at how smoothly the process went--Linux has come along
way since the early days of SLS/Slackware. Just about everything is
working, including my PnP modem, but I can't seem to get my sound card to
work. Here's most of the particulars, let me know if I forgot something
important:
The card is a Guillemot MaxiSound 64 Home Studio Pro, which uses a Dream
SAM-9407 and an ESS 1868.
I'm running the 2.0.36 kernel which came with the CD; I haven't rebuilt
it at all (yet).
In Win95, the card works fine. According to the device manager, it uses
the following resources:
MaxiSound 64 Home Studio Pro Audio Codec
DMA 0, 1
IRQ 5
I/O 220-22f, 388-38b, 300-301
MaxiSound 64 Home Studio Pro MPU-401 & Waves
IRQ 9
I/O 330-335
MaxiSound 64 Series
I/O 800-807
When I run pnpdump, the resulting isapnp.conf file has options for all
of these resources. Per the Control Center, none of the resources are used
by other devices, so I uncommented the respective lines and rebooted.
Doesn't work. In the control center, the only sound device listed is a
synth device, "Yamaha OPL-3". In /var/log/messages, I have one line that
says "sb: dsp reset failed".
I tried configuring the card via the setup program, and was able to
select the correct settings, but it didn't work. In messages, I get
messages of "SB 3.1 detected OK (220)" and "Sound: DMA (output) timed out -
IRQ/DRQ config error?"
So far, I see the following possibilities:
1. I'm misconfiguring something. If this is the case, I don't know what.
Could there be some sort of resource conflict even though the Control Center
doesn't indicate anything using the desired resources?
2. I need to rebuild or upgrade the kernel. I have the 2.2.5 sources,
and I understand that 2.2.x has better sound support than 2.0.x. Or, maybe
I just need to compile the sound driver into the kernel, rather than have it
as a module, which it is now. Would I be very likely to break something
else if I did this?
3. I need to get rid of this card, and use something else. I have an
Ensoniq Audio PCI card in another computer, and if I looked hard enough, I
could probably find my old SoundBlaster AWE64.
I'm not terribly concerned about getting the Dream chip to work, but I'd
like some basic sound functionality. I've checked the Sound HOWTO, but it
starts with recompiling the kernel, which I'm willing to do if I need to,
but if there's a simpler way to do this, I'd be interested. Thanks for any
help you can give!
--> Dan Brown, [EMAIL PROTECTED]
