Re: Soundblaster Live! 5.1 Digital
Lukas Latz, 2003-Jan-03 09:38 -0800:
> Thanks Jeff,
>
> I just took a few stabs at getting at the BIOS config (I'm not very
> experienced with that kind of thing). This machine used to be corporate
> and I suspect custom stuff in the BIOS. For example, it wants a boot
> password.
>
> When the machine gets to the point where you would normally see
> something like "press this to boot, press that for setup", all it
> offers is F1 one for boot and F11 for a (corporate) network boot.
> I've tried the other function keys but no avail.
> Are there any standard key combinations for this kind of thing? Or is
> there a GNU/Linux way of getting at the bios?
>From a thread I googled at
http://www.experts-exchange.com/Hardware/Q_10307974.html
"A good thing to know on some Compaq computer (and old IBM PC and Dell
too) is that when you acces the bios, you don't access bios in
motherboard but in a system partition (usually 30 Mb on hard
drive). If this partition has been deleted, you won't get acces to the
bios and you will need to reinstall that partition (ROMPAQ in Compaq
"terms") or create a diskette from another identical workstation.
Consult http://www.compaq.com/support/files/desktops/us/index.html to
download the right one"
> The whole approach makes little sense to me, since, without the card, I
> always got warning messages from KDE about how there is no sound
> hardware, which went away as soon as the SB card was there, so I would
> have supposed if the card is detected and indeed used, it's sound jacks
> would be active.
> After all, outputting signal on the card's output jacks (which are
> physically part of the card) seems to me enterly up to the card itself.
> If the mainboard's jacks also output signal, why should that conflict?
> I can understand that the BIOS can deactivate the card, but judging
> from lsmod, this doesn't seem to be the case.
> I would suppose that "use the card but not the jacks" could be the kind
> of message that can be transmitted via /etc/modules.conf and the driver
> modules, but how could the BIOS transmit such a message to the card?
You make valid points. What does lspci show you (as root). If you
see the onboard sound along with the SB card, that may indicate that
the onboard sound is still active, but has issues. You might also
consider booting to Knoppix with the SB card removed to see if Knoppix
can make the onboard sound work. I've found Knoppix to have great
autodetection and setup routines and I use it in situations just like
this.
jc
--
Jeff Coppock Systems Engineer
Diggin' Debian Admin and User
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