Date: Mon, 16 Nov 1998 17:36:48 -0500 (EST)
From: Matthew Hiller <meh25@pantheon.yale.edu>
To: linux-list@pantheon.yale.edu
Subject: Re: pantheon login util, some questions
On Mon, 16 Nov 1998, Clark Freifeld wrote:
> Also, if I wanted to buy a linux-compatible sound card (my current one is
> Plug-n-Play), what are some good brands/models? How hard is it to get
> sound working?
My sound card's also plug-'n-play (an ISA SB 16 PnP).
Back when I had RedHat 4.2, I had to a good amount of work to set
it up. The first thing that I did was I set up the isapnptools utilities,
and put something in my startup scripts that would automatically run the
critical utility that would detect and properly configure my PnP sound
card. (I don't know if this'll work for PCI hardware, but I'd imagine that
there's something out there that will if the isapnptools won't.)
The next thing I did was recompile my kernel to include
Soundblaster 16 support, loadable as a module.
Then I added the command to load up the module to my init scripts
after the key isapnptool had been run. There's probably a slicker way to
do that with kerneld, but I've never really understood kerneld anyway.
This whole process was simplified greatly when I upgraded to
RedHat 5.1. As of 5.0, actually, a sound card configurator runnable as
root called sndconfig which makes use of isapnptools has been included in
the basic RedHat distribution.
I don't remember if soundcard setup was taken care of
automatically by the RH 5.1 install or if I had to run sndconfig later on;
either way, the eventual setup was effortless.
Matt