Debian help, please

Neil Joseph Schelly neil at jenandneil.com
Sat Mar 26 21:04:01 EST 2005


On Saturday 26 March 2005 05:46 pm, Bill Freeman wrote:
> a net install CD, and installed woody.  (I figured that stable would
> be wiser until I'm wiser.)  All well and good.  I even got it to
I might suggest trying Testing until you're wiser.  It's notoriously hard to 
start with Debian Woody (and far harder to start with Potato or something, 
too).  The new installer is the first that's really a smooth installation 
start to finish.  That said...

> it boots, all well and good.  But 1. still no sound, even when I
> modprobe via82cxxx_audio (which is what works for knoppix); and 2.
The via_82cxxx chips are a pain in the ass at times.  While it's possible this 
is a Debian problem, I've had systems where I just gave up trying.  Lots of 
via_82cxxx systems I've setup, I've used the ALSA drivers with more luck than 
the OSS ones.  YMMV.  One consistent thing I've noted with lots of via sound 
chipsets is that Master doesn't do anything in the mixer.  Lots of times it's 
the headphone or surround or some other slider that actually makes sound come 
up.  Make sure to play with the mixer a bunch before discounting that the 
driver is working or not.  That said, the drivers can often yield rather 
sub-par sound quality too (but it may be fine).


> the tulip driver will no longer load (something about device busy,
> I'll get the real message if desired, but that's a ways back, see
As for the tulip driver, that's odd.  That usually is one of those drivers 
that "just works" - so long as it matches your kernel version, I can't 
imagine why it wouldn't.  I haven't used tulip cards in awhile, though, so I 
can't say I've done any troubleshooting with them really.  Anyway, this seems 
more a kernel version issue to me - very odd.

Hope some of that helps somewhat (at least for sound).
-N



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