[Techtalk] Alsa on Debian unstable

[Wim De Smet]

On Thu, 2 Dec 2004 21:00:19 -0500, aec <brat at magma.ca> wrote:
> Hello
> 
>   I am having problems getting sound working on my Dell inspiron 8200
>   laptop.
> 
>   I am using Debian Sid, kernel 2.6.8. The card installed in this
>   laptop is known as an intel8x0.
> 
>   I have up to tonight though it was an alsa or kernel problem but
>   just noticed this in dmesg:
> 
>   supergrass ~ # dmesg | grep sound
>   No soundcards found.
>   ALSA sound/pci/intel8x0.c:2514: unable to grab IRQ 7
>   ALSA sound/pci/intel8x0.c:2822: joystick(s) found
>   ALSA sound/pci/intel8x0m.c:1241: unable to grab IRQ 7
> 
>   dmesg shows an irq problem, this is new to me in linux, the last time I
>   had IRQ issues was with win 98 I think. How does one go about troubleshooting
>   IRQ problems in linux?
> 
>   This dmesg btw is from the fresh install, oddly though, 3 nights ago, with
>   alsa still not working on the old install, dmesg showed only this:
> 
>   supergrass ~ # dmesg | grep sound
>   No soundcards found.
> 
>   So, I am now not sure what the next step should be? I am thinking even to
>   install XP and see if windows picks up the card, at least that will rule out
>   hardware failure?
> 
>   thanks so much...
> 

I think IRQ errors are usually non-fatal. Usually sound errors in sid
are from having both alsa and OSS modules loaded. Do lsmod (paste it
here) and look if there are both snd-* modules and the standard OSS
modules. This seems to happen often with hotplug.

Also, did alsaconf work, what does alsamixer say, etc. If it is an IRQ
problem, the most common way to try to tackle it is to choose a
different way of the kernel detecting them, especially with regards to
how the whole thing interacts with ACPI. You can try booting with
pci=noacpi for this purpose. The other options are documented in linux
Documentation/kernel-parameters.txt

greets,
Wim