I've been trying off-and-on for months to get sound working on this box. The Readme's and HOWTOs and Dogpile searches just aren't answering my questions.
I've got an ES1371 (Audio PCI 97) sound card (from Gateway Computers in an E-4200 box). First Question: When running "make menuconfig", I go into the "Sound" entry and then press "m" on "Sound Card Support" to make it a module. This expands into several other options: Ensoniq AudioPCI (ES1370) Creative Ensoniq AudioPCI 97 (ES1371) S3 Sonic Vibes Support for Turtle Beach MultiSound Classic, Tahiti, Monterey Support for Turtle Beach MultiSound Pinnacle, Fiji OSS Sound Modules Having read that some es1371 boards are actually es1370s, I selected both Ensoniq and marked them with an "m" to make them modules. I don't really understand the difference between the OSS Sound Modules and the others above that. I kindda thought that all the sound drivers in the kernel were OSS drivers, but this leads me to think that there are two types: the ones that are not OSS, and the ones that are. Anyway, if I "M" the OSS Sound Modules entry, I see that the "100% Sound Blaster Compatibles" includes "ESS", and I wonder if this is necessary for support of my card. Even though my card is an "ES" and not an "ESS", I still have my suspicions. So my first question: Do I just need the ES1371, or do I need the ES1371 and the ES1370, or do I need the ES1371, the ES1370, and the OSS with 100% SB Compatible, or do I need some other combination? Second question: I'm assuming that I can install this/these drivers as modules rather than compiling them directly into the kernel. Is that a correct assumption? Okay, having compiled the ES1370 and ES1371 drivers in as modules, and having done a make dep, make clean, make bzImage, make modules, and make modules_install, and having copied the arch/i386/bzImage file to /boot/vmlinuz and modifying my lilo.conf file as necessary and re-running lilo and rebooting, I'm supposed to see (according to what I've read) references to the sound card fly by at boot time. Yet I don't see such a thing. Furthermore, according to the HOWTOs, etc, I'm supposed to be able to do a "cat /dev/sndstat", yet that returns a "No such device" error. The /dev/sndstat file does exist. I suspect the problem is IRQ,DMA,IOport-related, but the HOWTOs seem to focus on ISA PnP cards rather than PCI, so I'm a little confused. I have learned enough to run "lspci -v" which returns quite a bit of info on various cards (ethernet, ISA bridge, etc); it also has the following: 00:0e.0 Multimedia audio controller: Ensoniq ES1371 [AudioPCI-97] (rev 06) Subsystem: Ensoniq: Unknown device 1371 Flags: bus master, slow devsel, latency 96, IRQ 11 I/O ports at 1080 Capabilities: [dc] Power Management version 1 When I try to play sounds (using sox or splay, etc, or saytime), I sometimes get garbled sound, but more often than not, messages like "no such output file" or "no such device", etc. Hopefully someone can help me figure out where to go from here. Thanks!