ISA sound card in RH9 ???

[Calum]

ok well now i am using RH9 as my main system, i have the same question that i had in slack about my sound cards, perhaps i will get an answer since it is red hat, well here goes:

ok so i have already got a C-Media PCI sound card. it's driver is called cmipci and i assume it gets loaded in the startup scripts with '/sbin/modprobe cmipci' like it did in slack 9. This card is still physically plugged into the computer, as is my new (old) sound card, which is a Creative Awe64 ISA card. The ISA card doesn't seem to come up in the output of lspci (unsurprisingly), how do i confirm that linux can find it?
i think the right driver may be called 'sb', since i just did 'modprobe sb' out of curiosity and got no errors. When i start up an mp3 in xmms though, the output can be heard by plugging the speakers into the C-Media PCI card, but not the Creative ISA one. must i do something to block the PCI card before the ISA one can be used?

as an aside, both cards are detected by windows9x (well i had to install drivers for the C-Media one and then reboot, you know the drill) but windows was using the ISA Creative one by default until i disabled it in the control panel, and it now uses the C-Media one. Red hat by contrast just uses the C-Media one and ignores the ISA one, which is not what i want, i want all systems to use the ISA one.

basically i'd like to know if anybody knows anything that might be helpful in this situation, not that i am desperate i just like to know stuff rather than fiddling around blindly.

So mainly: is there an easy way to check out all the hardware in the computer? is there an easy way to find out what driver should be loaded for a particular bit of kit. what's the deal with the whole PCI/ISA soundcard conflicts thing where they are both plugged in at once, or both drivers are loaded etc?

thanks of course in advance.
and don't feel you need to go searching google, i can do that myself, but not to such a huge degree of useful success sadly, but mainly i am just looking for stuff that is probably obvious but which i don't know, never having used ISA stuff before etc.

[Void Main]

ok so i have already got a C-Media PCI sound card. it's driver is called cmipci and i assume it gets loaded in the startup scripts with '/sbin/modprobe cmipci' like it did in slack 9.

Well, sort of. Kudzu should have detected your card and added it to the hardware database (/etc/sysconfig/hwconf) and put a module entry for it in /etc/modules.conf so when a program tries to use your sound card for the first time it will auto-load the sound module at that time.

This card is still physically plugged into the computer, as is my new (old) sound card, which is a Creative Awe64 ISA card. The ISA card doesn't seem to come up in the output of lspci (unsurprisingly), how do i confirm that linux can find it?

I believe the same thing should have occurred for your ISA sound card. Kudzu should have detected it and added it to the /etc/hwconf and added module information to /etc/modules.conf. You could check over those files and see if you see entries for it.

i think the right driver may be called 'sb', since i just did 'modprobe sb' out of curiosity and got no errors. When i start up an mp3 in xmms though, the output can be heard by plugging the speakers into the C-Media PCI card, but not the Creative ISA one. must i do something to block the PCI card before the ISA one can be used?

My guess is that one of your sound cards would use devices like "/dev/dsp", "/dev/mixer", "/dev/audio", and the second card would use "/dev/dsp1", "/dev/mixer1", "/dev/audio1", etc. The sound apps would have to be configured to use one or the other (or both). Now this is just speculation on my part as I have never run more than one sound card under Linux but that's the way it works for any other device.

[Calum]

excellent! you appear to be 100% correct!
now if i wanted to make the ISA card the default, would i simply rename /dev/dsp1, /dev/mixer1 and /dev/audio1 to /dev/dsp, /dev/mixer et cetera and rename all the /dev/dsp, /dev/audio etc to /dev/dsp1 and so on? or is there something special about the /dev/ stuff that i need to know about before i go fiddling around with it?

also, in your opinion will kudzu do "stuff" that might jeopardise the ISA sound card working if i remove the C-Media card from the computer at a later date?

thanks for your input you have put me on the right track.

if kudzu had for some reason not picked up this card by the way, would i have had to learn how to use mknod to make the new devices, and then find out what kernel module to load and then load it myself? how does one figure out the correct module to load for a given piece of hardware anyway?

[Void Main]

I believe renaming the devices might work but I would think there should be a cleaner way to do it. My guess would be that there are sound card module parameters in /etc/modules.conf which would indicate which device each driver uses. For instance my sound card module is cmpi and it is set to use sound-slot-0:

Code: Select all

alias sound-slot-0 cmpci


I am guessing that if I had two cards the second one would reference "sound-slot-1", but it's entirely possible that I am wrong on this. If I am right then I would go even farther and say that if you changed all the 0's to 1 and all the 1's to 0 where you see references to the sound-slot then it should load them like you want. Again this is all speculation but it seems logical to me.... I'm not sure if kudzu runs the mknod command automatically or not, if not then you would need to run it manually and know what params to use. My dsp is 14,3 and my dsp1 is 14,19, then I have a dsp56k at 55,0 that I have no idea what purpose it serves. The mixer is 14,0 and mixer1 is 14,16. audio is 14,4 and audio1 is 14,20.

Good luck!

[Calum]

alias sound-slot-0 cmpci
post-install sound-slot-0 /bin/aumix-minimal -f /etc/.aumixrc -L >/dev/null 2>&1 $
pre-remove sound-slot-0 /bin/aumix-minimal -f /etc/.aumixrc -S >/dev/null 2>&1 ||$
alias usb-controller usb-uhci
alias sound-slot-1 sb
post-install sound-slot-1 /bin/aumix-minimal -f /etc/.aumixrc -L >/dev/null 2>&1 $
pre-remove sound-slot-1 /bin/aumix-minimal -f /etc/.aumixrc -S >/dev/null 2>&1 ||$
alias synth0 awe_wave

is my modules.conf file, it all looks very simple, i'll just change all the zeroes to ones and vice versa.
i too have a dsp56k, i assumed this was something to do with my serial port modem although i can't imagine what.

thanks again for helping me with this it's much appreciated.

[Tux]

You should make yourself a little bash script that will take the option pci/isa and switch to the settings for the relevant soundcard.
It wouldn't take long, you may have fun :p

[Calum]

true, still my aim is simply to ascertain that the sound blaster card works 100% well (so far it's fine) and then i can just get rid of the C-Media card altogether.