Soundcard on Mandrake 9.1

[anglevane]

I'm a fairly new user running 9.1 on an IBM Thinkpad 390, with a MagicMedia 256 soundcard. Mandrake says there's a module and loads it when it starts up, but it says there's an error opening aumix and the sound won't work. I tried updating to 10.1, but it didn't help and ran slower on my machine so I went back to 9.1 again. Help?

[Dapper Dan]

I'm not at all familiar with your soundcard but you might have luck trying to configure it with alsa. From the commandline as root:

alsaconf

And follow the directions.
If alsa isn't installed on your box you can install it with:

urpmi alsa-*

[BillSchaffer]

Which type of TP 390, specifically? There were quite a few. Aside from the 390 variants, there's the 390E and the 390X. Look on the bottom for the "type" number.

I have a 2626-20U and can help you out with the OSS drivers for that. Note, I'm a Slackware user, not Mandrake, but thought I might be able to help you. Anyway, presuming you have the same model...

I have never succeeded in getting the NM256AV drivers to work, even though that is the soundcard that seems to be in the system, lspci reports it as being there.

Instead, the Yamaha OPL3SA2 drivers do work. I don't understand how, as the NM256 is a PCI chipset, and the OPL3SA2 is ISA-PnP. Probing with isapnp finds nothing.

My BIOS settings for audio show:

SB I/O 0x220
WSS I/O 0x530
ADLIB I/O 0x388
MPU I/O 0x300
CTRL I/O 0x120
DMA A 0
DMA B 1
IRQ 5

This equated to a modprobe line like:

modprobe opl3sa2 mss_io=0x530 irq=5 dma=0 dma2=1 mpu_io=0x300 io=0x120

Note that we don't use the SB or ADLIB entries, and WSS is now called MSS. This works for my machine.

How you get this info into Mandrake, I don't know.

As for ALSA, I am struggling with that now. The OPL3SA2 driver does not work, and neither does the NM256 driver. The OPL driver seems to realize that this isn't the right chipset, and the NM256 driver is finding that the codec mask register in the chip doesn't match what it wants to see for an AC97 codec. If anyone out there can help with this, I'd really appreciate it.

-Bill

[BillSchaffer]

Ok, to get ALSA to work on the TP 390, you will have to disable the PnP feature. On the modprobe line, add "isapnp=0". It should work then.

-Bill