[ale] Sound problems in Debian 2.6 kernel

[Jason Day]

Sorry I took so long to respond, I've been away...

On Tue, Jul 06, 2004 at 02:33:29PM -0400, james at sumners.ath.cx wrote:
> I _loathe_ the i8x0 sound cards. Complete crap.

Agreed.  I've had limited experience, but I haven't been impressed.
With the 2.4 kernel, the OSS drivers sounded awful.  MP3s sounded
distorted.  So I tried ALSA, and it sounded much better.

> 
> I have had limited success with the i8x0 ALSA driver in 2.6.x. The card
> in my laptop works but it starts to crackle. The card in a workstation I
> used didn't work at all. So, you may want to just try the deprecated
> (read works) OSS driver. You may only get one sound channel but at least
> you get audio.

Hmm, maybe it's an issue with the kernel.  On another box, CUPS stopped
working when I upgraded from 2.6.3 to 2.6.5.  It works again with 2.6.6.
Maybe this is a similar issue with ALSA and the i8x0 driver.  Ugh.

> 
> I would seriously recommend trying to get a cheap SBLive!. The values
> are about $15 now.

Yeah, but this is my box at work.  I don't think IT would get too upset
if I installed a sound card, but I would rather not push it.  Besides,
at this point, I want to know what the problem is and fix it.

The sound modules are all loaded correctly, and there are no errors when
I play a WAV or MP3 file.  There's just no sound output, like the volume
is at 0 or muted.

Thanks,
Jason
-- 
Jason Day                                       jasonday at
http://jasonday.home.att.net                    worldnet dot att dot net
 
"Of course I'm paranoid, everyone is trying to kill me."
    -- Weyoun-6, Star Trek: Deep Space 9