No FOSS drivers for Dell e521 / Nvidia MCP51 High Definition Audio

[Michael ODonnell]

>> >{ 0x10de, 0x026c, PCI_ANY_ID, PCI_ANY_ID, 0, 0, DEVICE_NFORCE }, /* MCP51 */
>> >  to the snd_intel8x0_ids array in sound/pci/intel8x0.c will cause the
>> >intel driver to recognize and handle the card.
>> Yeah, you'd think that might be a reasonable shot-in-the-dark,
>   [...]
>
>But the hda_intel supported it minimally?  What kernel version?
>The changelog to the module seemed to insinuate that it worked
>pretty well.


The hda_intel driver initializes/manages the hardware well
enough that RealPlayer or xmms or FlashPlayer can at least
play music through it, and it sounds OK - no worse than the
SoundBlaster I had in the machine I just retired.  But none
of those apps can control the volume, so I always have to be
running alsamixer or tkmixer, as well, for use as a volume
control.  And neither alsamixer nor tkmixer offer to allow
me to adjust anything other than the volume - all the rest of
the mixers and such are either not presented or not functioning.

My distribution is a very recent Debian unstable.

## uname -a
Linux e521 2.6.19.2.e521 #1 SMP Sat Jan 27 11:09:20 EST 2007 i686 GNU/Linux

## lsmod
Module                  Size  Used by
snd_hda_intel          21016  1
snd_hda_codec         181888  1 snd_hda_intel
snd_pcm_oss            40736  0
snd_mixer_oss          16640  2 snd_pcm_oss
snd_pcm                70660  3 snd_hda_intel,snd_hda_codec,snd_pcm_oss
snd_timer              21764  1 snd_pcm
snd                    51304  6 snd_hda_intel,snd_hda_codec,snd_pcm_oss,snd_mixer_oss,snd_pcm,snd_timer
soundcore              10208  2 snd
snd_page_alloc         10632  2 snd_hda_intel,snd_pcm
	.
	.
	.