[linux-audio-user] ALSA 0.9.1 on IBM ThinkPad T20

[Greg Reddin]

Hey all,

I'm sort of a Linux newbie.  I've been using Linux pretty much
exclusively for a little over a month.  I've used and developed on
Unix for several years, so much of it is familiar to me.

Anyway, I got ALSA up and running fine on my desktop machine, but am
having problems with my laptop.  I searched the web for days and
can't seem to find consistent information, so I wonder if you guys
could help.

My laptop is an IBM Thinkpad T20 with a "Cirrus Logic CS-4614/22/24
CrystalClear SoundFusion Audio Accelerator" soundcard.  I'm running a
fairly "vanilla" installation of RedHat 8.0, meaning I didn't
reconfigure the kernel or anything like that.  The kernel version is
2.4.18-14.  The OSS driver for cs46xx was installed, and I believe
the sound test worked during installation.  But since then, audio has
not worked at all.  XMMS will play,and you can see the meters
popping, but no sound comes out of the speakers or headphones.

I downloaded the ALSA 0.9.1 tarballs and ran through the
installations.  The first problem I ran into was unresolved symbols
due to symbol versioning in the kernel.  I fixed that by adding the
following to the alsa-driver Makefile:

ifdef CONFIG_MODVERSIONS
CPPFLAGS += -include 
  /usr/src/linux-2.4.18-14/include/linux/modversions.h
endif

So, I did a make clean, reran the ./configure, make, make install, 
./snddevices, and installed alsa-lib and alsa-util.  At some point I
had to rmmod the cs46xx OSS driver because it complained that it was
in use.  I also chmod'ed the /dev files as the doc suggested.

I used gnome-alsamixer to unmute the channels and set levels.  At
first alsaplayer would play a file (.wav or .mp3) and the meters
would show activity, but no sound would be present.  Now, when I try
to run alsaplayer, play, or xmms I get an error message that says
"Cannot open device: /dev/dsp".

So has anyone gotten ALSA 0.9.1 to work on this kernel?  Should I use
a different ALSA package or a different kernel?  Any suggestions
would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Greg Reddin

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