ragu@vsnl.com wrote:

Aleksandar

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the onboard sound card is ISA. Is there an easy way to get isapnp kernel module for CentOS 3.8, other than recompiling the kernel

This card can be configured and you can make it work using 'isapnptools' .

http://www.roestock.demon.co.uk/isapnptools/

I've planned to send email back to the list with the progress I had so far. However, since there were couple of things I wasn't 100% sure they are correct, I kind of hold on it.

I'll describe what I have so far, and if anybody can help me finish it, it would be splendid.

I found the device driver for SoundBlaster cards (sb.o) in kernel-unsupported package. It contains device drivers for bunch of other cards not present in standard kernel too. The kernel-unsupported is just collection of additional device drivers for standard kernel, not replacement of standard kernel. Which is kind of nice. The ISA devices seem to work just fine with standard kernel. Which is kind of to be expected, built-in serial/parallel ports on many motherboards are ISA devices.

In BIOS, I've changed setting to be as follows:

Plug & Play OS No On Board Audio: I/O Base Address: 0x220 IRQ Channel: IRQ5 Capture DMA Channel: DMA CH1 Playback DMA Channel: DMA CH3 FM I/O Base Address: 0x388 MPU I/O Base Address: 0x300 Joystick: 0x201 Audio Control Interface: 0x800

After that I updated /etc/modules.conf with above info. I've found that sb device driver isn't best at automatically detecting settings, so I've passed them as parameters. There's couple of things I'm unsure of.

Sb device driver has two options to specify DMA channels. dma for 8-bit DMA channel and dma16 for 16-bit DMA channel. However, in my BIOS these are called "capture" and "playback". Hmmm... I've found on the web that some people were passing capture DMA channel using dma option (8-bit DMA channel), and passed -1 as option to dma16 (thus disabling it). I'm not exactly sure if this is correct. Should I have used playback DMA instead as parameter for dma (or maybe for dma16)? It would be nice if somebody could shed some light onto this.

I guess the correct driver for "FM" stuff is opl3, and driver for MPU stuff is mpu401. Those should be MIDI devices, right? Wrong? I haven't yet really tested them. If I place a line like "alias midi opl3" in /etc/modules.conf (as many pages I found suggest), the opl3 driver is not loaded automatically. However, if I place something like "alias sound-slot-1 opl3", than it is loaded. Not sure if this is right thing to do though. Anyhow, what about that mpu401? Is it used for anything at all? I also see there's uart401 module that gets loaded automatically when sound module loads.

There's also ESS specific audio control interface at 0x800. It seems it is not used by sb device driver. I remember that some ESS chips work only in 8-bit when emulating SoundBlaster cards, and for 16-bit stuff ESS native driver is needed (which would than use that 0x800 port). I've no idea if that is the case with the 1878 chip too.

Currently, my /etc/modules.conf looks like this:

# Ethernet alias eth0 xircom_cb alias eth1 orinoco_cs # USB alias usb-controller usb-uhci # Sound alias sound-slot-0 sb options sb io=220 irq=5 dma=1 dma16=-1 isapnp=0 esstype=1878 options mpu401 io=0x300 options opl3 io=0x388 post-install sound-slot-0 /bin/aumix-minimal -f /etc/.aumixrc -L

/dev/null 2>&! || :

pre-remove sound-slot-0 /bin/aumix-minimal -f /etc/.aumixrc -S

/dev/null 2>&1 || :

# This seems to be needed to actually use IRQ assigned to parallel port options parport_pc io=0x378 irq=7

I can use the sound card (yeeee), but I'm not sure if all the settings are really correct and optimal. Especially the DMA stuff.