No Sound from es1879 except WoofWoof on configuring

[rft-hillview]

I am a newbie on Puppy but not on computers.
I am running Puppy 4.2.1 from 20gb hard drive on a Gateway Solo 5150 - PII M300 with 228+32 mb ram.
This has a an ESS ES1879 sound card with the following values (read from the dual booting and working Windows XP)

Base I/O address 240 - 24F
DMA channel 1
DMA channel 3
interupt IRQ 5
FM sythesizer 388
MPU I/O address 330 - 331


With no sound at all I ran AlsaSetup - it found the correct sound card and apparently loaded appropriate drivers.
It rewarded me with a "woof woof"

However on attempting to play a CD with Gzine the sound that comes out is intermittent and scratchy to the point of being worthless. Having rerun Alsasetup was again rewarded with the puppy barking and now no sound at all afterwards.

This laptop has a hardware volume control which does change the level of the noise which comes out. None of the various software sliders controlling sound make any difference to the lowsy sound quality or to its being intermittent.

All works fine in Windows so hardware is OK

Having followed a what posts I can find and Googled for help it becomes obvious that
1) the age of the information I can find in these Puppy posts is too old to be assistance and
2) we are not the only Linux variety with a history of problems on this particular legacy hardware.


Unfortunately I lack the Linux knowledge to follow up any of the posts in any other linux Forum and certainly lack the knowledge to implement any code changes in Puppy

Any Help is welcome - thanks

the following links refer to other flavours which have had similar problems around 2005/6:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+sour ... +bug/39007
http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-12525.html

My problem is that I dont know how much of this is already taken into account in Puppy 4.2.1 's Alsa....

[rft-hillview]

After much messing about I can report the following:

1) In The ALSA WIZARD I deliberately reset the sound card to the wrong card type - choosing instead of the correct es18xx the "legacy ISA (non-PnP)"

I let this process complete and of course it failed totally and definitely no WoofWoof

2) I then ran the ALSA WIZARD again and this time chose the correct card es18xx and let this process run to completion - this time I was greeted by the cheery WoofWoof - good old Puppy - so now you want to play - YES

So now in Pmusic I can play MP3 files with acceptable sound quality.
So far so good ..........

Now we need to get it playing from CD - Gxine does indeed play the cd but only in bits - plays a bit , misses a bit , plays a bit and so on and the sound quality is not good.

My guess is this is a resource problem although clearly not for resolution in this hardware forum unless somone has some bright ideas ??

[rft-hillview]

I can take no credit for this - the need to re-apply alsasetup after each reboot is fixed by:
http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=37800
read it to the end
my thanks to the guys who know a lot more than me.

sound from Gxine playing CD is still intermittent and harsh but Pmusic is absolutely fine form MP3 files
Sound from Alsa player with CD input is better than Gxine but less stable than Pmusic - probably needs some tweaking in the mixer

[rft-hillview]

The laptop in question is Gateway Solo 5150 - I added extra ram so now have the maximum for this machine (256+onboard 32) = 288 mb

The sound from Gxine is now much better - not perfect but acceptable