Sound ES1371 issues

[Kent West <westk@acu.edu>]

I've been trying off-and-on for months to get sound working
on this box. The Readme's and HOWTOs and Dogpile searches
just aren't answering my questions.

I've got an ES1371 (Audio PCI 97) sound card (from Gateway
Computers in an E-4200 box).

First Question: When running "make menuconfig", I go into
the "Sound" entry and then press "m" on "Sound Card Support"
to make it a module. This expands into several other
options:

    Ensoniq AudioPCI (ES1370)
    Creative Ensoniq AudioPCI 97 (ES1371)
    S3 Sonic Vibes
    Support for Turtle Beach MultiSound Classic, Tahiti,
Monterey
    Support for Turtle Beach MultiSound Pinnacle, Fiji
    OSS  Sound Modules

Having read that some es1371 boards are actually es1370s, I
selected both Ensoniq and marked them with an "m" to make
them modules.

I don't really understand the difference between the OSS
Sound Modules and the others above that. I kindda thought
that all the sound drivers in the kernel were OSS drivers,
but this leads me to think that there are two types: the
ones that are not OSS, and the ones that are.

Anyway, if I "M" the OSS Sound Modules entry, I see that the
"100% Sound Blaster Compatibles" includes "ESS", and I
wonder if this is necessary for support of my card. Even
though my card is an "ES" and not an "ESS", I still have my
suspicions.

So my first question: Do I just need the ES1371, or do I
need the ES1371 and the ES1370, or do I need the ES1371, the
ES1370, and the OSS with 100% SB Compatible, or do I need
some other combination?

Second question: I'm assuming that I can install this/these
drivers as modules rather than compiling them directly into
the kernel. Is that a correct assumption?




Okay, having compiled the ES1370 and ES1371 drivers in as
modules, and having done a make dep, make clean, make
bzImage, make modules, and make modules_install, and having
copied the arch/i386/bzImage file to /boot/vmlinuz and
modifying my lilo.conf file as necessary and re-running lilo
and rebooting, I'm supposed to see (according to what I've
read) references to the sound card fly by at boot time.

Yet I don't see such a thing. Furthermore, according to the
HOWTOs, etc, I'm supposed to be able to do a "cat
/dev/sndstat", yet that returns a "No such device" error.
The /dev/sndstat file does exist.

I suspect the problem is IRQ,DMA,IOport-related, but the
HOWTOs seem to focus on ISA PnP cards rather than PCI, so
I'm a little confused. I have learned enough to run "lspci
-v" which returns quite a bit of info on various cards
(ethernet, ISA bridge, etc); it also has the following:

00:0e.0 Multimedia audio controller: Ensoniq ES1371
[AudioPCI-97] (rev 06)
 Subsystem: Ensoniq: Unknown device 1371
 Flags: bus master, slow devsel, latency 96, IRQ 11
 I/O ports at 1080
 Capabilities: [dc] Power Management version 1

When I try to play sounds (using sox or splay, etc, or
saytime), I sometimes get garbled sound, but more often than
not, messages like "no such output file" or "no such
device", etc. Hopefully someone can help me figure out where
to go from here.


Thanks!