New to slackware, need help with sound

[icarus127]

Well I'm posting from my new 2.6 kernel, and better yet sound now works! It's also noticeably faster, firefox opens in something like half the time it did on 2.4. I'm guessing that 2.4 wasn't using the full cpu and 2.6 does, but I would really like to know for sure. Here is the output of "cat /proc/cpuinfo".
hehe now I have to decide if I want to try putting in the smp 2.6 kernel or not

Oh, another question. when I installed the 2.6 kernel I had to make an initrd image and tree using the mkinitrd command. Do I need to leave that un-touched or is that just a first boot requirement? It's not a big deal if I need to leave it, but if I try the smp kernel I'll need to know if my 2.6 generic needs that or not.
Thanks for all your help rong

processor	: 0
vendor_id	: AuthenticAMD
cpu family	: 15
model		: 43
model name	: AMD Athlon(tm) 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 4200+
stepping	: 1
cpu MHz		: 2211.510
cache size	: 512 KB
fdiv_bug	: no
hlt_bug		: no
f00f_bug	: no
coma_bug	: no
fpu		: yes
fpu_exception	: yes
cpuid level	: 1
wp		: yes
flags		: fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush mmx fxsr sse sse2 ht syscall nx mmxext fxsr_opt lm 3dnowext 3dnow up pni lahf_lm cmp_legacy ts fid vid ttp
bogomips	: 4427.52

edit:
I looked around and you're correct Rong. If it was recognizing both cores there would be another section there for cpu 1. Guess I'll have to load the smp kernel if I want dual core support after all.

[rong]

Well I'm posting from my new 2.6 kernel, and better yet sound now works!

Congrats....

the mkinitrd command. Do I need to leave that un-touched or is that just a first boot requirement? It's not a big deal if I need to leave it, but if I try the smp kernel I'll need to know if my 2.6 generic needs that or not.

I assume you know what initrd does (if not man mkinitrd) so yes it needs to be there. Since I have not installed the smp kernel I don't know but I assume that it's explained in Pat's readme. I'm guessing it will be the same but not sure. You'll find out, right?!!

Good progress there.

[icarus127]

I plan to find out A bit annoyed right now though. Everything was working find last night, booted into 2.6 at least once, probably more like 3-4 times IIRC. I haven't changed a thing aside from routine software installation (rox,SciTe, firefox 2, aterm, etc.) and now I went to boot this morning and neither 2.4 or 2.6 will boot.
The boot process starts, gets to the point where it tries to mount the root filesystem and says that /dev/sda3 does not have a valid ext2 superblock. Which, of course it doesn't because
a) sda3 is my swap partition and,
b) I'm using ext3 on sda4 which is my / partition. But if I understood the mkinitrd man page the initrd.gz file is supposed to handle booting ext3.
Do you have any ideas? I'm going to boot from a live disk later on and look at the lilo configuration. A previous install had the / as sda3 and swap as sda4 so I'm wondering if something somehow got carried over. But it doesn't make sense that it would just start trying to boot that partition. What else could cause this? I must had inadvertently done something bad, but I can't for the life of me figure out what. oh, I have lilo on the MBR.

edit:
It let me log into a recovery console in single user mode once I swapped in my ps/2 keyboard. I think there was a problem with the lilo.conf file (2.6 does not have the root option set, but 2.4 does so why can't it boot?). I changed the conf file via a live disk but I can't run the lilo command to update the boot map because when I'm in the recovery console the filesystem is read only.
Do you think this is the problem and if so how do I allow myself(root) to write to the filesystem?

[rong]

mount -o -rw /dev/sda4

I see you left 2.4 on there. Why? Your problem may have something to do with how you did that. I know there are circumstance where you would want to retain the previous kernel but in your case your 2.4 was problematic so seems to me a better strategy to start with a clean install, get used to it, give it a bit of time for testing before installing a lot of 'extras'.

When I reinstall I always start clean: i.e. delete the partitions, set new partitions, format and then install, except that I don't normally touch my /home partition which I keep on a seperate partition.

[icarus127]

mount -o -rw /dev/sda4

I see you left 2.4 on there. Why? Your problem may have something to do with how you did that. I know there are circumstance where you would want to retain the previous kernel but in your case your 2.4 was problematic so seems to me a better strategy to start with a clean install, get used to it, give it a bit of time for testing before installing a lot of 'extras'.

Well honestly because it seemed the simplest thing to do 2.4 is the only option my dvd gives for installation so I did an install of that then copied the 2.6 kernel, modules, and headers off the dvd from the /extras and installed them using installpkg. Ran mkinitrd and set up the lilo.conf for 2.6. So yeah, I left it in mostly because I didn't know what else to do with it

Thanks for the reply, I'm going to try that now.
edit:
well, it's fixed. I should have thought to check it earlier. Somehow in my fstab the /dev/sda3 and 4 got switched so sda4 was being mounted as swap and 3 as /. The only thing I can think of is that some of the software I compiled from source in my previous install when 4 was swap and 3 was / switched it for some reason. I don't know what would do that though.

[rong]

You've indirectly answered something I was wondering about. Configuring for a boot into optional kernels in one distro entails a lot more than just leaving it installed!

[icarus127]

That would seem to be the case. I just tried installing the smp kernel as well. I followed the same instructions for installing the 2.6 kernel and things got kinda odd. I had LILO set up for all 3 (2.4, 2.6, 2.6 smp) and 2.6 smp fails boot saying 2.6 smp kernel modules not found, 2.6 seems to be fine.
BUT, and here's the odd part, the original LILO option for the default 2.4 kernel now boots a 2.6 kernel that recognizes both cores on my cpu. I'm gonna leave things alone for now and just be content with this while I try to figure it out. Once I have extra time, probably spring break, I might have enough knowledge/time to do things right
Thanks for all your help Rong

edit:
Well, torsmo is telling me that I am running the generic-smp-2.6 kernel so as far as I can tell installing the smp kernel packages using installpkg from the DVD does an in place upgrade of the default 2.4 kernel.

[rong]

I am tempted to build up a dual core system just to keep up with the times

See you around after spring break and it's been my pleasure to help at least a liitle bit.

cheers, ron