The next thing to fix was sound: I was getting overly loud beeps, and that's about it.
Some messages on the linux-dell-laptops
mailing list suggested using the i810_audio module.
When I did a modprobe i810_audio, some things worked
(the beeps got more pleasant), but not everything (I still
didn't get sound in Tux Racer).
Rather than figure out how to get it all to work using modules,
I decided to recompile the kernel; it was something I felt like
doing eventually anyways, just so I'd know what was in it. But
if you're just interested in getting sound to work, see below.
Also, NTFS wasn't supported in my kernel, so I needed to recompile to put that in so I could read Windows XP files.
My general philosophy was to put stuff in modules whenever possible. Kernel modules didn't exist the last time I played around with Unix much; they seem like a really good idea to me.
I went a bit overboard with this at first, however. Modules are
files; so the parts of the kernel necessary to read those files
can't be modules, obviously. I was sensible enough to compile
my filesystem type into the kernel (though actually I could have
just compiled in ext2
and left ext3
as a module, I think), but at first I compiled some lower-level
disk drivers as modules. Oops. Fortunately, I got all that
fixed; now sound works, NTFS works (read-only, at this time
writing is somewhat experimental: Microsoft apparently
doesn't release the specifications for its file system!), and my
kernel is about 2/3 the size it was before. Whee.
After recompiling the kernel, I had to recompile and reinstall the video driver as well.
Here's my .config
file.
Eventually, I got sound to mostly work using modules: I compiled sound as a module, and put the lines
alias sound-system-0 i810_audio alias char-major-14 i810_audio
in /etc/modules.conf. After this, sound didn't
quite work right when I first booted the machine (beeps were
overly loud), but it worked fine as soon as I started X, and
probably would have worked well if I used any program that
required more sophisticated sound support than just a beep.
That's a pretty good option, and one I recommend to people who
don't want to compile the kernel. (Though I won't guarantee
that it will work for other people: I haven't tested this on a
stock Red Hat kernel.) But
it's not perfect. To get it to work right, I'd need to find a
way to get i810_audio to always be loaded; but
trying to go out of my to do that via modules seems perverse,
since it might as well just be compiled into the kernel in that
situation. So I ended up switching back to having sound be
compiled in rather than a module.
I still won't guarantee that everything about sound is working perfectly: frankly, I haven't pushed it all that hard. But it seems to work well enough for everyday use; this includes listening to baseball games, as well as other applications that do more than just beep.
Last modified: Mon Jul 8 16:23:23 PDT 2002