Friday, December 25, 2009

Slackware Sound Card Problems

Recently my 4-5 year old laptop bit the dust due to hardware failure. So I have been forced to knock the dust off the old Slackware box and use it as my primary computer. After performing the steps needed to convert this old linux router into my new desktop I have ran into a problem with the sound card.

root@solarislackware > lspci | grep Multimedia
00:1f.5 Multimedia audio controller: Intel Corporation 82801BA/BAM AC'97 Audio (rev 11)

Great... I at least know what the sound card is even though it's not working correctly with this old Slackware 11 installation.

root@solarislackware > modprobe snd-intel8x0
insmod: insmod snd-intel8x0 failed

well... looks like I don't currently have the driver I need for this sound card.

root@solarislackware > modinfo soundcore
description: "Core sound module"
author: "Alan Cox"
license: "GPL"


Well, at least I have the sound core module loaded into my current kernel. Now I need to install the ALSA packages from my old Slackware install cd #1. I put the cd into the drive and mounted the disk to /mnt/cdrom. Next cd /mnt/cdrom/slackware/ and run the following command

root@solarislackware > for i in $(find ./ -name '*alsa*.tgz' -print) ; do installpkg $i; done

The end result is that alsa-driver, alsa-utils, alsa-oss, and alsa-lib all get installed onto the system. Next I ran the alsaconf to config my card, alsamixer command to set my volume levels followed by alsactl store to save my config.

root@solarislackware > alsaconf

root@solarislackware > alsamixer

root@solarislackware > alsactl store

I checked my work by clicking on kmix and when it loaded it was no longer useless. kmix actually has some pretty controls to use and it had found a sound card on my system.

I now have sound on this old computer. I tried to build ALSA from source but it just was not working for me. Luckily I had the Slackware 11 install cd handy and was able to get what I needed from there.


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