[gobolinux-users] bemoaning the lack of sound

[Michael Homer]

On Nov 23, 2007 3:06 PM, Isaac Dupree <isaacdupree at charter.net> wrote:
> now I'm growing a liking for music, so the problem becomes urgent!
>
> on my may-2007 Macbook, ubuntu feisty can still make sound and gobo
> still can't.  Now using Linux-2.6.23.8-r3, Udev-116-r2,
> ALSA-Lib-1.0.14a, ALSA-Utils-1.0.14.  Maybe upgrade alsa to 1.0.15?
> Maybe use ALSA-Driver versions of drivers?(how is that done on gobo? - I
> didn't find any information by googling; currently I have no
> /Programs/ALSA-Driver)
>
> I note that from `dmesg` on Gobo I find
>
> Advanced Linux Sound Architecture Driver Version 1.0.14 (Fri Jul 20
> 09:12:58 2007 UTC).
> ALSA device list:
>    No soundcards found.
>
> whereas on ubuntu feisty, searching `dmesg` I find no mention at all of
> "ALSA" or "Advanced Linux Sound Architecture", which seems odd, since
> sound works and it's a modern linux... and its dmesg looks full enough
> of random stuff that I doubt it's being censored for verbosity reasons,
> since lots of other things aren't being censored...
root at wispamok ~]dmesg|grep ALSA
root at wispamok ~]
So I think that's normal behaviour. Sound works for me with the same
config as you. I would check the kernel config to make sure a) your
card is enabled and b) it's as a module, so you can load and unload
different possibilities and see what happens. `gunzip -c
/proc/config.gz | grep SND` will extract the relevant sections from
the running kernel config, which is useful for seeing what's disabled
more than enabled. lsmod will show you which modules have been loaded
already, and modprobe -l which are available.

Also, since Ubuntu is working, you can piggyback on its hardware
detection by running `lsmod` on it and enabling the same modules on
Gobo while I watched the logs. The snd_* modules are most of what you
want, there may be dependencies on a few others which should be loaded
automatically. Google suggests Macbooks have integrated Intel sound,
same as me, so you're probably looking for either snd_hda_intel or
snd_intel_8x0, both of which work pretty well in my experience.

You also need to have OSS emulation enabled for the Gobo KDE packages
to work, as I recall. And the ALSA volume defaults to zero, so you
need to turn that up to something reasonable. Those two wasted a fair
bit of time for me when I was setting things up before I figured them
out.
-Michael