[clue-tech] ens1271 sound mystery - partial solution

[Collins Richey]

In an earier post, I alluded to problems with my sound card. I've got
an older Sound Blaster card that is really an ensonic AudioPCI (there
are other several names as well), and such cards are supported by the
alsa ens1371 module. Although the appropriate module is provided, this
card will not work out of the box with Debian Etch, [K[ubuntu 6.06,
CentOS4.3, and even the latest Gentoo stable.

After mucho RTFM, googling, and forum diving on Gentoo, I came up with
a solution by accident. The sound card appears to start normally at
boot (a click is heard), but alsactl complains that it does not like
certain index and name values when the controls (/etc/asound.state)
are restored - no sounds are produced. After much experimentation, I
discovered that the module has to be loaded, removed, and loaded again
to avoid problems when restoring the settings.

Bummer, this sucks badly. Nevertheless, I've hacked the gentoo
alsasound bootscript to do just that, and sound works, but KDE still
produces no sound.

More puzzling ahead.

On a side note, the AMD64 3700+ cpu and 1g memory in this box really
rock! I can compile kde and pals in less than a day, and xorg,
firebird, mysql, postgesql, and apache compiles are done almost before
I think to check back

Enjoy,

-- 
Collins Richey
     If you fill your heart with regrets of yesterday and the worries
     of tomorrow, you have no today to be thankful for.