Dell Mother Boards

[Martin McCormick]

	I have some admittedly old but functional Dell desktops
that all use the CS4236 on-board sound card. The audio can be
good but even better, any beeps from the P.C. speaker are mixed
with the analog output from the CS4236. If you set amixer
correctly, the beep utility gives you a nice square-wave tone
which is what the timer-counter chip used for the P.C. speaker
does.

	The problem is that as of wheezy, the CS4236 is no longer
supported and does not show up with aplay -l. A different sound
card such as some of the SoundBlasters or other non CS4236 cards
or even a USB sound card works and can be card 0 but you lose the
P.C. speaker beep in your audio output.

	Has anybody found a way to get it back that works at the
hardware level?

	Another side effect of this state is that speakup is apt
to never work properly which means one's choice is to keep one
older system frozen in time at one of the earlier versions of
Linux so it talks.

	The truth about the CS4236 is that it has issues such as
bus activity interferes with the sound at times causing an
effect similar to a tape player which is losing it's pinch roller
but if you know that, you just use the CS4236 for non-critical
audio.

	I would just like to get it back as one of the sound
cards so the P.C. speaker audio can be fed to headphones and
speakup could work on systems that are otherwise capable of using
it.

Martin McCormick