great install; ALSA, X, modules questions

[Matt Zimmerman]

On Sat, Oct 02, 2004 at 04:36:12PM -0400, Scott Campbell wrote:

> Just finished installing the Oct1 daily on my Thinkpad 600E. That went
> flawlessly, except it did not detect my linksys 10/100 USB NIC during
> install.

Currently, there are a small number of NICs which are not detected by the
installer, but which work fine in the installed system, due to different
hardware detection methods (something we will be working to unify for
Hoary).

It would be great if you could add your card to
http://wiki.ubuntu.com/HardwareSupport (with the exact model number) to
record its status.

> Once X was loaded and I looked at the HAL device manager it was there, and
> I added it in the Networking dialog. Well done. Smoothest Linux install
> for me ever, nice replacement for Debian/testing.

Thanks!

> 1) ALSA is not detecting things properly, but alsaconf (which has always
> worked well) disappeared after refreshing the repository and updating this
> morning? This is a finicky soundcard, but I've never run a 2.6 kernel, so
> there might be something I've missed. I know ALSA is integrated now, and
> the FAQ suggested that older ISA cards need special treatment, but
> alsaconf worked well in the past.

alsaconf was deliberately removed because it is not up to date with the 2.6
module loading facility and was breaking working configurations.

For now, you can add the module for your ISA card to /etc/modules along with
any options it requires.

> 3) I'd like to use Thomas Hood's tpctl and thinkpad module driver. I was
> rolling my own kernels with make-kpkg before, but I'd like to stick with
> the simplicity of Ubuntu, and stick with the kernel images provided. I
> grabbed 2.6.8.1 sources with synaptic to compile the module only, but of
> course, I'm running the stock 2.6.8.1-2-386 kernel, so modprobe doesn't
> find the new module. Can somebody point me out of this, I'm not a real
> hacker, just a user. Is there a better way to compile a specific
> module/driver and use the stock ubuntu kernel?

You need to build with the headers for the exact kernel you're running.  A
convenient way to get those is:

sudo aptitude install linux-headers-`uname -r`

This will provide the 'build' symlink in /lib/modules/`uname -r` that 2.6
modules expect to find.

-- 
 - mdz