[ubuntu-za] Hardy

[Simon Cross]

On Tue, Jun 17, 2008 at 8:24 PM, Bill Cairns <cairnsww at gmail.com> wrote:
> OK - so perhaps downloading the latest source of the whole alsa suite and
> re-building is going to solve my problem. On the other hand perhaps it
> won't. I am very reluctant to go down that route - somehow it seems to
> confirm every popular prejudice against Linux - that it is for Geeks only.
> If Ubuntu can't run on my stock standard off-the-shelf Intel PC, how much
> faith can I have that the next release is even going to support my ethernet
> card?

These hardware issues are going to keep cropping up until hardware
vendors take responsibility for ensuring that their hardware is
supported by kernel.

Ethernet cards and sound cards are very different.

> Advice on what to do next? It seems I can -

Part of the problem with sound cards is that detecting the exact setup
in use by probing the hardware can be very difficult. A case is point
is the snd-hda-intel driver for ALSA.  This single driver supports
almost 30 similar codec chips and between them more than 100 different
models. The difference between these models is mostly in the
configuration of the input and output jacks.

My advice is to "aptitude install alsa-source" and then unpack
/usr/src/alsa-driver.tar.bz2 somewhere and read
modules/alsa-driver/alsa-kernel/Documentation/ALSA-Configuration.txt
section for the ALSA module you're using and see if you can manual
tweak the driver kernel options to get things to work. In my case,
manualling setting the model module option (by creating
/etc/modprodbe.d/snd-driver-tweaks with "options snd-hda-intel
model=targa-dig") helped. Something similar might work for you.

This is obviously an area where ALSA could to better but it's not
something that's simple to sort out or entirely ALSA's fault. I expect
we'll have to live with these sorts of detection bugs for a good while
to come.

Schiavo
Simon