Old ISA SB16 cards in FC3 - it works :)

[fedorento]

Hi all,

(this is my first post)

After reading lots of entries here and lot of search in google, I got my old
ISA SB16 sound card working using ALSA.

This is what I had to add to my /etc/modprobe.conf

#---------------
# ALSA portion
alias char-major-116 sound
alias snd-card-0 snd-sb16

# OSS/Free portion
alias char-major-14 soundcore
alias sound-slot-0 snd-card-0

# card #1
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-0-8 snd-seq-oss
alias sound-service-0-12 snd-pcm-oss

options snd-sb16 port=0x220 mpu_port=0x330 irq=7 dma8=1 dma16=5 isapnp=0
#---------------

notice that I used irq=7 instead of 5 as documented everywhere, but I think this is
because I have a previous installed radio card using irq 5 (not sure).

with irq=5 the card also appeared to being switched on and volume controls work,
but no sound or strange sounds happened.


anyway make sure you set it for your IRQ and then after editing the mentioned file
reboot, login and turn on system sound server (either in kde or gnome).

next open your mixer and pull-up the relevant channel volumes (wich happen to be
in minimum by default)

if you use gnome you should be fine by now.

if you use kde, you should get a nice sound when opening a window or testing sound
but ugly noise in almost all other contexts.

this is because the event sounds selected in control center are almost all associated
with .ogg sound files, wich either the server or the aplay command cannot reproduce.

(is this because I did not install something about OGG Vorbis support ?)

choose to disable sounds of all applications at once, and then start selecting wav files
for the events you like, and you should be fine.

reduce also the time the server occupies the sound resource to 5 or 10 sec, as event sound should be short, to be able to open windows and give some command to aplay sound without waiting much time for the server to release it.

I have not configured MIDI yet, but I hope this helps a lot of people out there,
frustrated by a distro not working with the most linux friendly sound board .

regards

[mard666]

Thanks for this great posting! I don't know how I missed it before - now I can use my ESS1869 onboard soundcard. At first I chose the wrong parameters, but after trying with a couple modprobe finally accepted loading it. My final modprobe.conf look like this:

# ALSA portion
alias char-major-116 snd
alias snd-card-0 snd-es18xx
# module options should go here
options snd-es18xx port=0x220 mpu_port=0x330 irq=5 dma1=0 dma2=1 isapnp=0
# OSS/Free portion
alias char-major-14 soundcore
alias sound-slot-0 snd-card-0
# card #1
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-0-8 snd-seq-oss
alias sound-service-0-12 snd-pcm-oss

I tried in between each change in the parameters under #options to insert the module (modprobe -v snd-es18xx. Next alsamixer and rasing relevant volume levels.

regards

[matth45]

I know this is a really old post, but I found it helpful (in fedora 8!) getting the sb16 card in my parents' dinosaur of a computer working.

Two notes:
The sound module is now snd.
To get the card to show up I had to set PNP OS to NO in the BIOS.