Soundcard

[Dan Lindfield <dan.lindfield@example.com>]

Sorry guys but I'm back with the same old problem.

It's been a few months since I last asked how I could get this done and
I've not moved any further forward but I have become a lot wiser!

To summarize where I am:

I have a laptop ATLAS Flyer 4700SE, Atlas is a subsidiary of Hi-grade, a
UK/Taiwanese company.
It is fitted with a VIA Technologies chipset Sound card which shares an
IRQ with the USB port. I cannot get the machine to utter anything, it
remains silent.

At first I thought the Chipset was simply not supported by standard
Linux distributions and that ALSA sound was to be my answer, I also
thought the IRQ sharing was a problem. Followed all the ALSA sound HOW
to's and  installed ALSA. I thought I was progressing quite well but at
the end of the day sound was not emitted and much to my annoyance most
of the configuration files (e.g. /proc/asound etc. etc.) seemed to get
modified after I reboot, so that the sound card I originally specified
is not remembered. Great! From this failure I thought my problem was
PNP, ie. my machine was automatically detecting the card and deciding it
couldn't do anything with it. So I got out the pnptools How to's and
tried to detect the card but unfortunately the pnpdump could not detect
a thing. Well! I definitely thought there was something wrong with the
IRQ.

At this stage I took your advice, you suggested I forget ALSA and the
IRQ and simply try to compile the sound module with the VIA82C686Audio
codec driver available with the kernel. Once again I dragged out the
Kernel How To's and the Sound Module How To's and tried modprobing the
driver in place. No success I'm afraid to say, I still get the "Device
busy" error that I always get. Frustrated with everything I decided to
compile the kernel with the sound card driver and removed the sound
module. To my surprise the kernel worked (I was expecting it to crash an
burn!) but alas the sound card did not (Sound Config files again not
what they should be).

So, I think I'm missing something! Have I taken on something that is
beyond my comprehension? I've reached a stage where I really need to
start again. If anyone out there is an expert in sound cards has a bit
of patience and can guide me through it step by step then I would be
extremely grateful to hear from you.

A dumb laptop owner!!

Dan