HiNote Ultra 2000 - Debian 2.2 / PNP & Sound & Perf...

[Jérôme Lacoste <jerome.lacoste@smartcardsystem.com>]

Hei,

[This post was crossposted to comp.os.linux.portable and the debian-laptop
mailing list]

I have several little problems I would like to understand, so this post
contains several questions, some of them may be linked.


I have a Digital HiNote Ultra 2000 loaded with Debian 2.2_0, Kernel 2.2.17
(recompiled).
For info I managed to get my PCMCIA Xircom CreditCard Ethernet/Modem card
detected.
I configured the modem with wvdial, but I couldn't test it yet.
I didn't configured the network.


** PNP not working **
I am using pcmcia-cs 3.1.8 (I know it is outdated, but until I get a
network/modem connection I will keep using it).

I say that "PNP is not working" because Pnpdump never detects anything on my
system.
In my BIOS, each device can be either disabled, auto set by PNP or I can set
its configuration.
After having read some documents, I tried to modify my BIOS settings so that
I force the device' configurations, but this had no change.

I also tried to compile pcmcia-cs with "PnP BIOS resource checking" enabled,
but then my Xircom card is not recognized anymore at boot time (a high beep
+ low beep pattern). There was also an error message: "xirc2ps_cs: no ports
available".
So I had to recompile pcmcia-cs without this support. This may be due to the
pcmcia-cs version, but as I said, I would like to go on with that version
until I got direct connection from the laptop.

** 8 bit sound instead of 16 **
I managed to get the sound working using esd, but only in 8 bits mode
(esd -b). I know that this can happen, but my card seems to be. I do not
have Windows installed on the machine, so I cannot test it under DOS.
When I run esd in 16 bits mode, my console resolution mode changes (text get
smaller...). Is this normal?
If I try to play some sound, then the sound is played, but it is really
(noisy).
Here's the configuration I am using to set up my sound:

/sbin/modprobe sound
if [ -f /proc/sound ] ; then
    /sbin/insmod uart401
    /sbin/insmod sb io=0x220 irq=5 dma=1 dma16=-1 esstype=1878
    /sbin/insmod mpu401 io=0x330
    /sbin/insmod opl3 io=0x388
    /sbin/insmod v_midi
fi

I tried changing dma16 from 1 to 9 but without success. Anyway, dma16 is not
present in my BIOS settings, so I guess I have to let it at -1.

Perhaps this would be better if PNP was working??

** CPU usage when playing sound **
I use 25/30 % cpu to play mp3 files with xmms. Does this sound like a normal
figure for a 233 Mhz processor?


** /dev/sndcat: nothing under the Installed drivers and Card Config sections
**
What does that mean ?
I've seen some post where users have a working card but nothing under the
Card Config section.
My card is working anyway, but I find that strange.

** pnpdump creates error while playing sound **
+ I noticed that if I use pnpdump while I am playing some sound, I get the
following error message "Sound: DMA (output) timed out - IRQ/DRQ config
error?"
Is this normal?



Thanks to everybody!


Jerome