The system in question is a Dell Dimension 600-MHZ
Pentium from way back in 2000. The BIOS date is October 10 of
1999. The sound chip set is a CS4236 on the mother board and
it's always been touchy about working. You can count on the
sound dying after any significant upgrade but once you get it
working, it works very well for both recording and playing.
The problem seems to be that automated methods for
finding sound devices frequently miss this "card" and that is
what happened after upgrading from squeeze to wheezy.
The output of aplay or arecord -l shows no sound cards
present even though dmesg sees the card.
[ 1.617732] pci_hotplug: PCI Hot Plug PCI Core version: 0.5
[ 1.617835] pciehp: PCI Express Hot Plug Controller Driver version: 0.4
[ 1.617846] acpiphp: ACPI Hot Plug PCI Controller Driver version: 0.5
[ 1.618473] intel_idle: does not run on family 6 model 8
[ 1.618553] ERST: Table is not found!
[ 1.618562] GHES: HEST is not enabled!
[ 1.618621] isapnp: Scanning for PnP cards...
[ 1.719015] 01:01: card 'CS4236B'
[ 1.719026] isapnp: 1 Plug & Play card detected total
That is exactly what is there right now, that one card
but alsa doesn't seem to know about it any more.
As a computer user who is also blind, I use the
accessibility features built in to the modern Linux kernel when
they work and I have a stack of various boot and rescue
disks such as "Talking Archlinux," Vinux4.0 and the
regular old installation disks for ubuntu and wheezy which all
talk on many systems but not this one. The silent failure of
archlinux is interesting because there is both a recording of an
actual human voice at the beginning introducing the talking
archlinux distribution plus speakup which is the software speech
generator one gets when switching to the rescue shell. No sound
is audible on this system from the sound card and I bet now that
algorithm for discovering sound cards is not finding any card
once again.
Older boot disks such as Vinux2.0 based on lenny from
2009 talk just fine on this system so the problem almost has to
be the modern algorithms for finding sound cards during boot.
This old Dell is not ready for the recycling center as
it has a gigabyte of RAM and can still do lots of useful work so
I hope there is a way to get audio working again.
I used the Vinux2.0 CD just yesterday so as to use dd to
copy one boot drive to another of the same size. It was kind of
scary because the device node for the boot drive came out as
/dev/hda rather than /dev/sda. /dev/sda was the good drive I was
copying from so I gulped, took a deep breath and did
dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/hda and got my copy without ruining the
master.
I probably can't do much about the CD images that don't
talk, but there are lots of Dells out there so let's hope a
sound-finding strategy that really does find the cards can be
developed one day.
In the mean time, is there a way to get the sound back
on this other wise working wheezy system? I plan to upgrade
again to jessie to bring it up to date. Unless there has been
work done on the sound discovery process while booting, I expect
the sound card to still be dead but the death occurred between
squeeze and wheezy.
Martin McCormick
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