>Bruce Tong wrote:
>
>> I know zilch about PnP as you can probably tell. What does it take for
>> Linux to work with that stuff?
>
>Like a lot of other common Micro$oft usages, PnP is essentially meaningless.
>All it really means is that the manufacturer has registered with M$ and
>supplied them with a driver for the device, which M$ then bundles with their
>OS. The card does have to meet certain specs I think, like being able to set
>the IRQ and other settings from software, but there's nothing intrinsic to the
>PnP designation that makes a device unusable by any OS.
>
>I draw my admittedly hackneyed conclusion from the fact that Win95 PnP
>'autodetection' just involves running through its list of drivers, loading
>each one (or at least a fragment) and seeing which ones will talk to a given
>card. The card itself doesn't usually do an ID on its own the way SCSI
>devices do, for example.
Umm, you have some info wrong here. The IRQ is not set by Win95. On the
two motherboards that I have, the IRQ assignments are done by the BIOS, long
before Win95 gets its ugly mits on the cards. That is why the BIOS gives you
the ability to take an IRQ and tell the BIOS not to use it for PCI cards and to
use it for legacy ISA cards. That way you can set the IRQ jumper on those
old ISA cards and not have the BIOS use it for a newer card.
Also, the Soundblaster cards, even though they are ISA, do spit out a boot-up
message giving the model number. The BIOS gets it and displays it. It is from
this message that I have discovered that the card was broken (it spit out
an illegal character).
BTW, I think that Linux has a real nasty problem with Soundblaster cards.
I've had to send back cards right and left because after a short time they
would be corrupt. The Creative tech looked up one of them and told me that
the EEPROM was rewritten. This problem happened when I was using the same
computer to boot between Linux and Win95. I still have a card that is broke.
I haven't bothered to send it back yet. It is a newer card and they
removed the ability to set the incoming and outgoing gain levels. Real
dumb move on Creative's part. In any event, now that I have separate
computers for Linux and Win95, the Soundblaster card in the Win95 box has
not failed. I do not have a sound card in the Linux box, because I'm afraid
that the boot process is going to ruin another card. I don't know what
kind of probing that Linux is doing to the sound card, but one would think
that it wouldn't try rewritting parts of the EEPROM.
If anyone has any ideas on what is happening during boot time, I'd sure
like to know.
MB
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