Nforce2 audio

jpc82 · Guru Joined: 09 Mar 2003 Posts: 326

What is currently better for the onboard nforce2 audio, ALSA or nvaudio?

Also if deside to use ALSA do I need to compile sound support into the kernel with any modules?

payam · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 30 Jun 2003 Posts: 145

i have nforce2 audio and i found that alsa is easier to set up (basically i couldn't get emerge nforce-audio to work, so i defaulted to the alsa driver which was a synch)

you need to compile sound support into your kernel, but don't need to check any of the sound cards listed under there.

visit http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/alsa-guide.xml for the gentoo alsa guide -- it is very informative and complete.

since i've done this once already, i can help you figure a few things out. basically the map of what you will have to do is as follows:

emerge alsa-driver
the guide shows you how to download only your driver

in /etc/modules.d/alsa, put:
alias snd-card-0 snd-intel8x0

"snd-intel8x0" is the driver for the onboard nforce audio.
_________________
Athlon XP 2800+ 2.08GHz 333FSB 512KB, Biostar M7NCD Pro nForce2, 1GB Crucial DDR 333, EVGA Geforce FX 5600 256MB, Hitachi 180GB 180GXP

jpc82 · Guru Joined: 09 Mar 2003 Posts: 326

First of all I have sound support and i8xx as modules in my kernel

I first ran
ALSA_CARDS="intel8x0" alsa-driver
ALSA_CARDS="intel8x0" alsa-lib
ALSA_CARDS="intel8x0" alsa-utils

in that order with arch=~x86 set ( I was told I needed to do this to get 4.1 sound). I then edited /etc/modules.d/alsa to have alias snd-card-0 snd-intel8x0. then I ran rc-update add alsasound boot.
When I ran update-modules this is what I get

depmod: *** Unresolved symbols in /lib/modules/2.4.21-ac4/kernel/sound/acore/oss/snd-pcm-oss.o
depmod: *** Unresolved symbols in /lib/modules/2.4.21-ac4/kernel/sound/acore/seq/oss/snd-seq-oss.o
depmod: *** Unresolved symbols in /lib/modules/2.4.21-ac4/kernel/sound/acore/seq/snd-seq-midi-event.o
depmod: *** Unresolved symbols in /lib/modules/2.4.21-ac4/kernel/sound/acore/seq/snd-seq.o
depmod: *** Unresolved symbols in /lib/modules/2.4.21-ac4/kernel/sound/acore/snd-pcm.o
depmod: *** Unresolved symbols in /lib/modules/2.4.21-ac4/kernel/sound/acore/snd-rawmidi.o
depmod: *** Unresolved symbols in /lib/modules/2.4.21-ac4/kernel/sound/acore/snd.o
depmod: *** Unresolved symbols in /lib/modules/2.4.21-ac4/video/fglrx.o

And when I do a /etc/init.d/alsasound restart this is what I get

* WARNING: you are stopping a boot service.
* ALSA driver is not loaded.
* Initialising ALSA....
* Starting sound driver: snd-intel8x0 /lib/modules/2.4.21-ac4/kernel/sound/acore/snd.o: unresolved symbol _mmx_memcpy
/lib/modules/2.4.21-ac4/kernel/sound/acore/snd.o: insmod /lib/modules/2.4.21-ac4/kernel/sound/acore/snd.o failed
/lib/modules/2.4.21-ac4/kernel/sound/acore/snd.o: insmod snd-intel8x0 failed [ ok ]

What did I do wrong?

PS. I now get system beeps that normaly go to my system speaker from my sound card, but no other sounds

payam · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 30 Jun 2003 Posts: 145

from what you said, you did everything right. i would check to see if it's the arch=~x86 that's the culprit first, because if it is, then all the debugging you'd do would have been worthless.

so try using the latest stable alsa and see what happens. this is just to check if the problem eminantes from using an unstable package.

of course, remember to emerge unmerge all three packages first.

if the stable alsa DOES work, then either
a) the unstable alsa doesn't work with nforce audio yet or
b) there's some more configuring needed with the newer version(s) of alsa (perhaps even the newer version keeps its config data in a different file like xfree4 vs xfree3)

if the stable alsa does NOT work then either
a) or b) or
c) we're doing something wrong
d) even though you have an nforce motherboard, the manufacturer decided to use a different chipset (highly unlikely, but i've heard of a few nforce mobo's with cmedia audio chipsets running around)

you can check for d) by doing a
grep audio /proc/pci
and check if it says nVidia Corporation nForce Multimedia audio........
_________________
Athlon XP 2800+ 2.08GHz 333FSB 512KB, Biostar M7NCD Pro nForce2, 1GB Crucial DDR 333, EVGA Geforce FX 5600 256MB, Hitachi 180GB 180GXP

jpc82 · Guru Joined: 09 Mar 2003 Posts: 326

I unmerged alsa-* and compiled a new kernel that only had sound support as a modules, with no drivers.

then I started again and I followed the ALSA-Guide, but this time I did not specify which driver to use and I let alsa install all drivers. However, when I did then alsa-driver failed with this error.

gcc -D__KERNEL__ -DMODULE=1 -I/var/tmp/portage/alsa-driver-0.9.2/work/alsa-driver-0.9.2/include -I/usr/src/linux/include -O2 -mpreferred-stack-boundary=2 -march=athlon -DLINUX -Wall -Wstrict-prototypes -fomit-frame-pointer -Wno-trigraphs -O2 -fno-strict-aliasing -fno-common -pipe -DALSA_BUILD -DKBUILD_BASENAME=mtpav -c -o mtpav.o mtpav.c
gcc -D__KERNEL__ -DMODULE=1 -I/var/tmp/portage/alsa-driver-0.9.2/work/alsa-driver-0.9.2/include -I/usr/src/linux/include -O2 -mpreferred-stack-boundary=2 -march=athlon -DLINUX -Wall -Wstrict-prototypes -fomit-frame-pointer -Wno-trigraphs -O2 -fno-strict-aliasing -fno-common -pipe -DALSA_BUILD -DKBUILD_BASENAME=serial_u16550 -c -o serial-u16550.o serial-u16550.c
gcc -D__KERNEL__ -DMODULE=1 -I/var/tmp/portage/alsa-driver-0.9.2/work/alsa-driver-0.9.2/include -I/usr/src/linux/include -O2 -mpreferred-stack-boundary=2 -march=athlon -DLINUX -Wall -Wstrict-prototypes -fomit-frame-pointer -Wno-trigraphs -O2 -fno-strict-aliasing -fno-common -pipe -DALSA_BUILD -DKBUILD_BASENAME=serialmidi -c -o serialmidi.o serialmidi.c
serialmidi.c: In function `open_tty':
serialmidi.c:158: invalid operands to binary >
make[1]: *** [serialmidi.o] Error 1
make[1]: Leaving directory `/var/tmp/portage/alsa-driver-0.9.2/work/alsa-driver-0.9.2/drivers'
make: *** [compile] Error 1

!!! ERROR: media-sound/alsa-driver-0.9.2 failed.
!!! Function src_compile, Line 59, Exitcode 2
!!! Parallel Make Failed

what does this mean?

jpc82 · Guru Joined: 09 Mar 2003 Posts: 326

If I told alsa to only compile intel8x0 it would compile fine. However when I did update-modules i get this still

depmod: *** Unresolved symbols in /lib/modules/2.4.21-ac4/kernel/sound/acore/oss/snd-pcm-oss.o
depmod: *** Unresolved symbols in /lib/modules/2.4.21-ac4/kernel/sound/acore/seq/oss/snd-seq-oss.o
depmod: *** Unresolved symbols in /lib/modules/2.4.21-ac4/kernel/sound/acore/seq/snd-seq-midi-event.o
depmod: *** Unresolved symbols in /lib/modules/2.4.21-ac4/kernel/sound/acore/seq/snd-seq.o
depmod: *** Unresolved symbols in /lib/modules/2.4.21-ac4/kernel/sound/acore/snd-pcm.o
depmod: *** Unresolved symbols in /lib/modules/2.4.21-ac4/kernel/sound/acore/snd-rawmidi.o
depmod: *** Unresolved symbols in /lib/modules/2.4.21-ac4/kernel/sound/acore/snd.o

and when I try to start alsa I get

* Initialising ALSA....
* Starting sound driver: snd-intel8x0 /lib/modules/2.4.21-ac4/kernel/sound/acore/snd.o: unresolved symbol _mmx_memcpy
/lib/modules/2.4.21-ac4/kernel/sound/acore/snd.o: insmod /lib/modules/2.4.21-ac4/kernel/sound/acore/snd.o failed
/lib/modules/2.4.21-ac4/kernel/sound/acore/snd.o: insmod snd-intel8x0 failed [ ok ]

What is going wrong?

avanover · n00b Joined: 08 Dec 2002 Posts: 1

I was getting those unresolved symbols error before when using alsa, and I found that if you do NOT specify a certain card, and just compile ALL the alsa drivers, than it works just fine..... atleast in my case it did.

jpc82 · Guru Joined: 09 Mar 2003 Posts: 326

thats what I was think, but when I try to do that it always fails with the error I said above

Unlucky_Alf · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 02 Feb 2003 Posts: 92

Do you have a symbolic link /usr/src/linux pointing to correct kernel-sources?

nabla · Posted: Wed Jul 02, 2003 11:11 am Post subject:

hi,

i once had the same problem, i use nforce2 on a7n8x.
this is what i did:

-unmerge alsa-stuff
-take out of everything (like bootscrips => rc-update), reboot (no alsa errors should appear)
-check kernel (soundcore as module, nothing else)
-reemerge alsa-driver, card only is okay
-follow the guide: http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/alsa-guide.xml

hope that helps

jpc82 · Guru Joined: 09 Mar 2003 Posts: 326

I tried that also, but I still get the same error.

I desided to redo my system because there seems to be some serious errors with this current system. I just tried to mount a smbfs share and I got a filesystem not supported error even though I have Filesystems->network filesystems->smb compiled into my kernel, and /proc/filesystems also has smbfs in it.

Also, yes I do have a proper link to my kernel setup