F11 fix for sound on Intel HDA machines ?

[stan]

On Sun, 21 Jun 2009 09:50:35 +1000
Danny Yee <danny at anatomy.usyd.edu.au> wrote:

> stan wrote:
> > Your drivers are at 1.0.18, and as someone else said there was a
> > lot of work done on hda-intel from 1.0.18 to 1.0.20.  You need to
> > update the driver package as described earlier in the thread.
>  
> Thanks for your help!
> 
> I pulled the 1.0.20 alsa RPMs out of testing and rebooted.  That
> didn't help immediately, but once I removed pulseaudio everything
> seems to be working (Mozart's Clarinet Concerto is playing as I type).

Whatever works!  Though I can't make a plausible connection of how
those two facts lead to sound for you.  :-)

> 
> > However, the fact that it was working in F10 means that there is
> > probably a model that alsa is able to discover that works for this
> > chip, even though not designed explicitly for it.  And in fact
> > there is mention of the chip in the code in relation to asus-p5q.
> > Perhaps the documentation just hasn't caught up to the code yet.
>  
> Yes, I have an Asus P5Q-VM motherboard.  I didn't think this was that
> new -- must be at least a year old now? -- but I guess if the sound
> chipsets are changing all the time that's a problem.

It's been awhile since I monitored alsa closely, but then ICH9 was the
cutting edge.  Probably ICH12 is now. :-)

> 
> I found this overview of sound in Linux (from Slashdot):
> http://insanecoding.blogspot.com/2009/06/state-of-sound-in-linux-not-so-sorry.html
> so I have a better idea what's happening under the hood now.

Lots of opinions there.  And as you can see from the comments, there
are as many viewpoints about sound in linux as there are users of sound
in linux.  The trouble is that sound is a desktop function, and the
money is all made in servers.  So how likely is it that sound will get
the resources?  ;-)

Given modern hardware and changes in the kernel I don't know that alsa
is the best way to do sound in linux, but it is the most comprehensive
and complete right now, and as it exists in linux serves my purposes,
so I don't worry too much about those deep architectural issues.