Installing Sound/ALSA on Inspiron 500m

[Cryogen Glacien]

Okay, I've got this one dual-booting Windows XP Pro and Gentoo Linux 2.4 (the gentoo-sources kernel, in other words). Everything seems to be working fine so far aside from the wireless, but I never really use that. I am, however, having problems getting the sound to work. This is my first experience with any Linux other than Mandrake, but I have the documentation and seem to have a natural bent for it (still plenty lost in some places though, like this one...).

At any rate, I believe this machine uses the Intel i820 chipset, but I'm not sure what to put in the ALSA_CARDS= line. My kernel also has soundcard support compiled right into it instead of as a module, so the "modinfo soundcore" returns nothing. Will that cause problems later? The Gentoo documentation does make references to modules in several places.

I'm following the ALSA Soundcard Matrix site's instructions thus far, and I'm a bit confused about a few things: are there drivers specifically on the site that I need to download for this chipset (and if so which) or does "emerge alsa-driver" take care of that and the "ALSA_CARDS=" line just inform it what soundcard is present? This is a totally new experience and any help would be appreciated. Thanks so much!
_________________
~Tall Dark and Bishoujo Computing~
Home PC: "Chikane" (ATX, AMD64 3700+)
School PC: "Hazuki" (uATX, AMD64 3500+)

[certux]

Hi,
i own an Inspiron 500m as well, and sound is working fine here, but I can only tell you how to achieve this using the gentoo-dev-sources (the 2.6 kernel branch), which also enables the WLAN.

In make.conf I set ALSA_CARDS="intel8x0".
The sound specific settings in the kernel config:
In Device Drivers -> Sound:
Sound Card Support (y)

In Device Drivers ->Sound ->Advanced Linux Sound Architecture:
Advanced Linux Sound Architecture (m)
Sequencer Support (m)
OSS Mixer API (m)
OSS Sequencer API (y)

In Device Drivers -> Sound -> Advanced Linux Sound Architecture -> PCI Devices:
Intel i8x0/MX440, SiS 7012; Ali 5455; NForce Audio, AMD768/8111 (m)


And that's it. I hope, this works for you as well. Good luck!

[Cryogen Glacien]

Thanks for the reply ^_^ Um...I dunno what the heck I did, but it's working now. I really like this distro too; it's so much more powerful than Mandrake.
_________________
~Tall Dark and Bishoujo Computing~
Home PC: "Chikane" (ATX, AMD64 3700+)
School PC: "Hazuki" (uATX, AMD64 3500+)