IBM ThinkPad A21e Sound Problems

SOUND PROBLEMS with MANDRAKE AND IBM a21e THINKPAD

I had a lot of trouble with the sound on my laptop. Often I would boot up and I would hear the startup sounds, then there would be a cracking and my sound would crap out. I finally found my solutions on Linux-Laptop.net and Linux Docs. All I needed to do was download the latest ALSA sound drivers and change my conf.modules file (etc/conf.modules) and added the following lines to the file:

alias parport_lowlevel parport_pc
# ALSA portion
alias char-major-116 snd
alias char-major-14 soundcore
alias snd-card-0 snd-card-intel8x0
alias sound-slot-0 snd-card-0
alias sound-service-0-0 snd-mixer-oss
alias sound-service-0-1 snd-seq-oss
alias sound-service-0-3 snd-pcm-oss
alias sound-service-0-12 snd-pcm-oss

After a reboot my sound worked just fine. My only problems following this change was due to certain sound file permissions. I had to add the group 'audio' to my user profile, and then, occassionally I had to add execute permissions to certain files (for games to work, etc.).

-------Mandrake 8.1---------
Mandrake 8.1 install presented some new alsa problems. I'm using Mandrake 8.1's standard edition (three CD's: One, Two and Four). The sound works just fine on a clean install with my Belkin Wireless PCMCIA Ethernet card. Once the install is done I can play CD's and hear system noises. The problem starts when I install Roaring Penguin's RPPPPOE RPM to get my DSL connection running. After the install (if I've played music already) the internet connection and sound work fine. However, after I reboot the sound no longer works. I suspect there's an IRQ problem (the ethernet and sound are probably on the same IRQ) but I haven't investigated too much. The default ALSA settings seem to be good (since sound works for a while) so I'm going to try disabling the network and card on reboot (set them to manual start) and see if that works. DHCP might also help so I'm going to test that now (I may have to get the Netgear DSL Modem/Router after all since it'll do NAT and serve DHCP). I'll post more as I find a solution.

[March 8, 2002]

I finally figured out my music problems so I thought I'd go ahead and post the reply for all. I'm using Mandrake 8.1 KDE desktop on an IBM a21e Thinkpad. I had a problem playing music CD's using the CDPlayer in KDE. The CD Player still crashes and won't configure properly but I did find a solution using XMMS. To configure XMMS properly I first had to open my /etc/fstab file to find out what my cdrom was mounted to, what I pretty much got was:

dev/hdb /mnt/cdrom

So armed with this information I started XMMS and went to Options->Preferences -> CD Audio -> Configure and set the device to /dev/hdb (as is specified in the fstab file) and the Directory to /mnt/cdrom/. Then I went to Play -> Directory -> /mnt/cdrom and I saw all the tracks on my music CD. Hope this helps some. Pls note that I had to alter my /etc/modules.conf file to update the alsa settings to:

alias parport_lowlevel parport_pc
# ALSA portion
alias char-major-116 snd
alias char-major-14 soundcore
alias snd-card-0 snd-card-intel8x0
alias sound-slot-0 snd-card-0
alias sound-service-0-0 snd-mixer-oss
alias sound-service-0-1 snd-seq-oss
alias sound-service-0-3 snd-pcm-oss
alias sound-service-0-12 snd-pcm-oss

Good luck all.