The toman diaries

Sound, this time in Fedora Core 2

torsdag, juni 03, 2004

I have an old Compaq system, a presario 5030. This isn't very nice to Most linux distros when it comes to (at least) sound.

Making sound work was moderately easy in Suse 9.0, all I did was tweak some settings, GUI style in Suse's excellent YaST config tool. Turning off PNP detection worked there. With Fedora Core 2, things didn't go as smooth intitially. I did run Core 1 once, and using sndconfig to adjust some settings worked nicely. Sndconfig doesn't come with Core 2 though, it uses ALSA which sndconfig apparantly doesn't work with.

What I had to do was laid out to me by a Fedora user by the name of Linus Walleij. He had installed it on a Compaq Deskpro EN, which has the same soundcard, in an apparantly equal configuration as that of the Presario 5030.

Simple steps:

Log in as root, then edit /etc/modprobe.conf. My modprobe.conf looked like this before this edit:

alias eth0 8139too
alias usb-controller uhci-hcd

There is my network card, and the usb controller.

I inserted these lines from the page linked above:

# ALSA portion
alias char-major-116 snd
alias snd-card-0 snd-es18xx
options snd-es18xx enable=1 isapnp=0 port=0x220 mpu_port=0x388 fm_port=0x330 irq=5 dma1=1 dma2=0

# OSS/Free portion
alias char-major-14 soundcore
alias sound-slot-0 snd-card-0

# 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

Now restart, and the sound works brilliantly. Just remember to run up the volume of PCM in the volume control.