ALSA, Via686a and Gnome
Hi,
I have a motherboard with integrated Via686a sound chip.
I'm trying to set up ALSA for it correctly, as it was suggested
by many people that ALSA drivers are preferable.
Unfortunatly, even though I've read all the documents and FAQs
found on their site, I'm still not sure weather everything is correct.
Especially in Debian terms (Woody). And allthough I'm able to get some
sound from console and XMMS, none of the Gnome sounds work for instance.
Also XMMS sound quality (mp3) is awfull.
I'm also unsure whether I'm using the correct setup.
If anyone with a similar setup or more experience could offer me some
advice I'd be most greatfull!
So here's what I did so far:
I've compiled a kernel (2.4.17) with only sound support enabled,
no other modules.
I've installed the alsa-source-0.5 package and also
alsa-utils-0.5, libesd-alsa0, alsaplayer.
(BTW there are also a bunch of packages for 0.4 and 0.9x.
What's the difference? I figured 0.9 was still beta, but why the 0.4?)
Uppon installing I was asked to configure the source via ncurses and
select the cards. I've selected via686a, but I'm not sure where this
choice was actually stored, as the source packages was installed in
gzipped tarball. Allthough there is a /usr/share/alsa-source-0.5
containing a modules.config, but I'm not sure what would use that...
So I've unzipped the source and did a ./configure --with-cards=via686a
then I've compiled and installed it.
Then I've run ./snddevices
And after that I've created /etc/modutils/sound with the below contents:
alias char-major-116 snd
alias char-major-14 soundcore
alias snd-card-0 snd-card-via686a
alias sound-slot-0 snd-card-0
alias sound-service-0-0 snd-mixer-oss
alias sound-service-0-1 snd-seq-oss
alias sound-service-0-3 snd-pcm-oss
alias sound-service-0-8 snd-seq-oss
alias sound-service-0-12 snd-pcm-oss
Here I'm a bit uncertain as all the documentation only describes
a GUS as an example, so I have no idea wheter the sound-services-x-x
part is correct like this or not...
Well at any rate I've run update-modules,
modprobe snd-card-via686a
modprobe snd-pcm-oss
(I've also added them to /etc/modules)
This seemed to work fine.
I've set the volume with
amixer-0.5 set PCM 100 unmute
amixer-0.5 set Master 100 unmute
Finally added myself to group audio.
Now I can play certain wav files with aplay-0.5,
but others only output silence.
Sometimes I get: 'Aplay: cannot find WAVE fmt chunk'
I can play mp3s with mpg321. Quality is not great but at least
it does not skip. Also it only works with -o oss but not with
-o alsa. The later says 'Error opening libao alsa driver.'
I have both libao2 and libao0 installed...
And now for Gnome:
I've tried to install esound-alsa but that conflicts with a bunch
of stuff so I left the standard esound.
According to Gnome Control Panel it is started when loading X.
None of the Gnome sounds work though (trying to play them from
the control panel)
XMMS works with esound output, but quality is horrible. It also
skips a lot. The oss output plugin freezes XMMS completely though...
So what am I doing wrong?
Is 0.5 the recommended version to install?
Are my aliases correct?
Is this the proper Debian way to set this up? (How to use alsa-source?)
Shouldn't I use esound-alsa?
Is there no ALSA output for XMMS?
Sorry for the huge mail, but I wanted to provide as much details as possible!
Many thanks for your help in advance!
best regards,
Balazs
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