[Gllug] Dell I8200 (was Sony Vaio)

[Jake Jellinek]

> I wouldn't touch HP stuff either.  Your best bet is the Dell range of
> laptops.  They're always extremely well specced all round, and you get
> good support for them as well.  Go for Dell :)
> 

Talking of Dells..I have an Inspiron 8200 (fairly large and heavy, but
also very high spec!) which I've installed Debian / KDE on to. I've
recompiled the kernel (2.4.17) and am running latest unstable
distribution with all the tweaks I need to make me happy :)

The only big problem I have right now is that I can't get the sound card
to work (under KDE anyway, I haven't tried anything else yet) :(

The manual states the card is an Cyrrus Logic/Crystal CS4205 but
/proc/pci and web searches seem to indicate that it's an Intel chipset:-

Intel Corp: AC '97 Audio Controller (rev 2).

I've been fiddling around with all kinds of configurations and kernel
modules etc to try and get things working with artsd. Various modules
load without complaint, and from my web searches and best guess the
i810_audio module with the ac97_codec look to be the best combination,
with one combining nicely with the other in the lsmod output.

What I get now though when I restart artsd is:-

"cpu overload, aborting"

In my web searches I came across what may be a very useful clue to those
that understand such things here:-

http://www.arts-project.org/doc/handbook/faq-hardware-specific.html

And in particular:-

"3 What is wrong in the driver if I get the cpu overload problem?

Usually, artsd uses select() to find out when to write new data. Then,
it uses an ioctl(...GETOSPACE...) to find out how much data to write.
Finally, it writes this data.

A problem occurs if artsd is woken up either always or if there are
minimal amounts of data to write. The OSS documentation specifies that
select() only wakes up a process if there is at least one fragment to
write. However, if artsd is woken up if there isn't data to write, or
very little, for instance one sample, then it will keep writing little
pieces of audio data, which can be very costly, and eventually overload
the cpu.

To fix this, the driver should wake up artsd only if there is a full
fragment to write."

Can anyone decode this a little for me and perhaps suggest what steps I
try to take to get things working? I have a horrible suspicion that
perhaps it'll only work in kernel 2.2 versions :/ I'm not sure why this
talks about waking up and in what context this is. I'm getting it every
time and always whenever I try and start artsd.

Thanks in advance for any tips/suggestions, and here's hoping someone
else out there has a similar sound card in their laptop working already
:)

Cheers,

Jake.

P.S. Got CD burning, wireless, infrared and NVidia drivers all working
already so this last hurdle is really the last thing I need to resolve
:)






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