Soundcard autodetection fails in 3.8... but works in 3.7?

[Junkster]

One more thing to try is deselecting any onboard sound and pnp in BIOS and adding the cheatcode pci=biosirq

Try to modprobe the module if lsmod shows nothing appropriate, or run modconf to do it.

Getting out of ideas really, and you're correct about the fact that an ISA card should work.

Hey holy crap we've made some headway here! okay... the short answer is that I now have sound again.

The long answer is the following: I did the modconf as suggested, enabled sbawe drivers and oss, adjusted the volumes, and voila -- wave output. midi still doesn't work, but I figure it's some other library that needs installation.

For diagnostic reasons, I rebooted, re-eneabled all the PNP stuff, ran modconf and enabled the same libraries, and still got wave (only, not midi) output. So it looks as this little conundrum has been resolved. 2 questions:

1) how do I enable MIDI... which modconf libraries would be required? opl3?
2) why did this work ok in 3.7 and requires manual settings in 3.8?

Thanks a million...

[Markus]

Glad you got sound and sorry that I can't answer the questions;
1) I don't have a midi device and have read that many people have problems with midi in knoppix. I've only used timidity to play midi.
2) Didn't use 3.7 much, just booted the CD ~4 times. You might want to check if the blacklist is changed for audio devices between 3.7 and 3.8.

[Junkster]

2) Didn't use 3.7 much, just booted the CD ~4 times. You might want to check if the blacklist is changed for audio devices between 3.7 and 3.8.

Where might this blacklist of hardware be found? Under /etc/hotplug ?

But then again, wouldn't blacklisting an ISA card be like allowing 1.44M 3½ floppies, but NOT older 720k's?

TIA again

[Markus]

Where might this blacklist of hardware be found? Under /etc/hotplug ?

Yes, especially /etc/hotplug/blacklist.d/alsa-base

But then again, wouldn't blacklisting an ISA card be like allowing 1.44M 3½ floppies, but NOT older 720k's?

Well you wanted to know what's changed between 3.7 and 3.8 and this is a possibility. Besides the way I've understood blacklisting is that it stops hotplug from loading the modules before the devicedriver itself claims them, so you might want to check that the modules ARE in the blacklist.

[jdebay]

Yes, I am like you in away...

I was using 3.4 and decide to give 3.8 cebit-2005 a try.

on boot line on 3.4 with 2.6 put "alsa=cm8738" this does not work with 3.8.

Did not put on boot line and 3.8 found cm8738. brought up mixer and change volumes, so now have 3 out of 5 speaker system working. I know this does not help you. Now looking for a mixer to set 4 channel sound.

[rick_the_nick]

Team,
I searched through this topic and also on other topics under "Hardware and Booting", and the trick of running "alsaconf" in a root terminal does actually work to detect soundcards and activate sound output.
However, the issue remains: I also used to run a Knoppix 3.7.x series CD, and sound worked perfectly in a variety of desktop and laptop machines with different sound HW without any cheats at all. After I switched to 3.8.x, I need to run alsaconf every time I boot from the CD to get sound.
Something was broken along the lines, in the move to 3.8, that totally broke sound at from boot time. I also tried several cheats, like acpi=force, alsa=driver, pnpbios=off, etc, and nothing worked for me.
Any clues if this could be fixed in, say, 3.8.3, or 3.9.x ?

Regards,

Ricardo