One more sound story.

[Les Mikesell]

Aaron Konstam wrote:
> I understand the value of continuing the development of Linux as Fedora
> is continuing to do, but evidently the effect is that older hardware
> is no longer supportable. At least that seems to be the case with
> sound in Fedora.
> 
> I have installed 13 versions of Red Hat and Fedora Linux since RH 4.x
> so I htink I have some experience in configuring sound as well as some
> other aspects of the Linux operating system. But my attempts to make
> sound work on a era 2000 Optiplex GXi in f8 seems doomed to failure. The
> degradation of sound started several versions ago. I had run FC1, Fc3
> and FC4 on this machine but problems started with FC6. FC6 would not
> recognize the sound card but and the correct sound drivers where not
> loaded. I had to run a modprobe snd-cs4236 in /etc/rc.local to get
> sound to work. A similar problem occurred in Ubuntu 6.06, 7.2 and
> 7.10.
> 
> In f8 we have a similar but unsolvable problem. The /etc/modprobe.conf
> has lines defining the cards parameters but they are ignored during
> boot in that the sound drivers are not loaded. The sound configuration
> program identifies the card but the test sound is not played until you
> explicitly tell it to load the drivers. But in the next boot you have
> to do that again to get the test sound. The usual programs to play CDs
> (such as gnome-cd) don't work reporting they can't find any sound to
> play
> even though one can see they accessing the correct device.
> 
> The only program that works to play CDs is grip. 
> cat /proc/asound/cards returns:
>  0 [CS4236B        ]: CS4236B - CS4236B
>                       CS4236B at 0x534, irq 5, dma 1&3
> so one can see that the card is identified as card 0. I have removed
> pulseaudio so that is not a factor, I have iinstalled the codecs in
> /usr/lib/codecs
> 
> Now I have found that sound works as root but not as a normal user.
> Someone else reported this so if a solution to this was found let me
> know.

I think that chip lives on the ISA bus in the optiplex.  The solution is 
probably to ignore it and find a pci card that works.

-- 
    Les Mikesell
     lesmikesell at gmail.com